kelly's heroes - The Screengrab

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History (Part Five)

KELLY’S HEROES (1970)

Like Three Kings (which it no doubt inspired), Kelly’s Heroes drops a heist flick into the middle of a war movie and winds up making some interesting points about free will versus obedience in a military setting where the grunts on the ground sometimes have more in common with the low-level enemy soldiers they’re fighting than they do with their high-ranking, high-living superiors. “You and us, we’re just soldiers, right?” Telly Savalas’ Master Sergeant “Big Joe” says to a German tank commander at one point. “We don’t even know what this war’s all about. All we do is we fight and we die and for what? We don’t get anything out of it.” True, the sentiment’s a little sketchy when the conflict in question is “The Good War” and the enemy solider in question is wearing Nazi S.S. stripes...but in the midst of the far less good Vietnam War, director Brian G. Hutton’s celebration of enlightened self-interest reached out to peaceniks and free market capitalists alike, courting both groups with a truly bizarre combination of actors including Savalas, Clint Eastwood, Caroll O’Connor, Donald Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton and Don Rickles. Sure, the movie’s pretty good...but I’m guessing it’s nowhere near as entertaining as the wrap party must have been. (AO)

Video of the Day: "Little Murders"

In the first flush of his stardom, Donald Sutherland was a counterculture hero: the original Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, a key participant in the anti-Vietnam "F.T.A." shows, and the movies' only stoned-hippie-World-War-II-tank-commander in Kelly's Heroes. It must say something about the culture, though God knows what, that he now plays a white-maned capitalist lion in the TV series Dirty Sexy Money. The show is pure cheese, but Sutherland is terrific in it. (We don't know what ABC is paying him, but whatever it is, he deserves twice as much just for continuing to report to work, knowing that every week Peter Krause is going to refer to him, in the explanatory voice-over that precedes each episode, as "Tripp, the empire builder.") In the most recent one, he walked his much-divorced, sexy-airhead daughter (played by the peerlessly glassy-eyed Natalie Zea) down the aisle yet again, a chore that he prepared for by getting and staying good and plowed the whole day and night, the better to dull the pain when she made her inevitable announcement that this marriage, too, just wasn't working out. It was hard not to watch the wedding scenes without remembering one of the funniest moments from the blazing youth of everybody's second-favorite lanky, now-elderly Canadian hippie. (A.: Neil Young, dummy.) We refer of course to his cameo in the 1971 Alan Arkin-Jules Feiffer film Little Murders, where he presides over the nuptials of his M*A*S*H co-star, Elliott Gould. It made us laugh the first time we saw it, and it's still all right. Everything is all right! — Phil Nugent

Posted Nov 19 2007, 12:00 PM by Peter Smith with | with no comments

Filed under: phil nugent, kelly's heroes, robert altman, peter krause, neil young, natalie zea, donald sutherland, dirty sexy money, alan arkin, little murders, jules feiffer, m*a*s*h, elliott gould

Landis and Rickles

Don Rickles and John Landis first worked together in the late 1960s, on the set of the World War II comedy-drama Kelly's Heroes. Actually, "working together" might be stretching it a little. Rickles, then a sometime movie actor but already a stand-up comedy legend, was one of the movie's stars; Landis, not yet the director of National Lampoon's Animal House, was a teenaged "gofer" — "I don't know if you know this," he tells reporter Bruce Bennett, "but production assistant is a relatively new term" — who was at one point pressed into service to appear briefly onscreen as a nun. Twenty-something years later, Landis cast Rickles as a mob lawyer in his 1992 horror comedy Innocent Blood, in which Rickles got his throat torn out by a vampirized Robert Loggia and loaded into an ambulance by an emergency worker played by a creepily solicitous Dario Argento. It took them a long time to figure out how to top that. The answer: a documentary, Mr. Warmth, which covers Rickles's life and career and features performance footage of the eighty-one-year-old comic in action. "It took a long time for him to agree to let me shoot his act," says Landis, because the old trouper, who apparently isn't planning on going anywhere, was afraid that having his material captured on celluloid would kill his career. In the end, though, he agreed, and when he examined the footage himself, Landis thought that he seemed oddly rapt. "Finally," says Landis, "I said, ‘What is so fascinating? You've done this for years.' He said, ‘I've never seen me from behind!'" — Phil Nugent

Posted Oct 18 2007, 01:00 PM by Peter Smith with | with no comments

Filed under: phil nugent, robert loggia, dario argento, national lampoon's animal house, innocent blood, kelly's heroes, don rickles, mr warmth, john landis