Received quickly and in very good condition. One of my most fav movies ever!

In KELLY'S HEROES, director Brian Hutton succeeds in reviving an earlier DIRTY DOZEN, and combines it with a Vietnam War style flair of left-wing anti-militarism that nevertheless carries the audience from start to finish. Clint Eastwood is cast in a role well-suited to his earlier penchant for playing the bounty hunter. Here he has learned of the existence of sixteen million dollars of gold in a German occupied French bank. He allies himself with a motley horde of names well-known to credit readers of the late 1960s: Telly Savalas as the loudmouthed sergeant, Carrol O'Oconnor as the equally loudmouthed cartoonish general, Donald Southerland as the hippiesh bearded tank commander, and Gavin MacLeod as the fumbling mechanic.

Much of the film is an uneasy mixture of a standard shoot-em-up war film of tanks, screaming strafing aircraft, and bloody ambushes with a comedic subtext of mercenary soldiers who view the war as a source of profit. Casualties on both sides are vastly different. Germans get blown away by the hundreds yet only two GIs die. This differential in mortality is needed to keep the film on track as a sometimes funny anti-war film that undoubtedly seemed hilarious in a Vietnam obsessed America of 1970 and only somewhat less humorous in an equally Iraq obsessed America of 2008. One does not question the many logical gaps involved in Eastwood's leadership of his mercenaries without his superiors finding out. Indeed, with the buffoonish Carrol O'Connor as the commanding general, one simply accepts that foolishness rather than professionalism is the only requisite for command. Donald Southerland is truly amusing in the same way that he later showed in MASH, but my thinking is that the real impact of KELLY'S HEROES lies not in amusing an audience with the antics of money grubbing soldiers but rather in convincing an already anti-war America that all wars in all times are no different from the one that Eastwood, Savalas, and their cohorts found so immensely profitable.

I bought this movie for my dad as a gift. He said he couldn't find it anywhere! So, I knew where to go! Amazon has everything! He was so excited! It is one of his favorite movies. I remember watching it with him before. It is an excellent and very funny movie! (and I'm not big on war movies!)