"Where Eagles Dare", taken from an original screenplay by prolific warmaster Alistair MacLean ("The Guns Of Navarone") was one of the last staunchly traditional studio war films.......serious as a heart attack, with stoic, super-heroic commandos grimly going about their explosive business of outwitting Nazi forces while racking up a higher German body count than the bombing of Dresden.....
Scored to the relentless military snare drums of Ron Goodwin's ominous score, the film maintains its stiff upper lip even though its heroics are far fetched to the point of fantasy......it's like watching all fifteen episodes of a 1940's Saturday matinee serial stitched together. Our two commandos (Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood) stay invincible throughout as they penetrate a German castle fortress to rescue an American general, slaying countless Germans along the way....(Burton even peevishly gripes about sustaining a minor flesh wound on his hand......as for the implacably stone-faced Eastwood, he remembers to give a polite 'hello' to various unlucky sentries before plugging them....)
Maybe that's why we love "Where Eagles Dare".....as ludicrous as it is, it believes whole-heartedly in itself. Nobody kids around, even if we silently chuckle at the sight of German firepower forever missing our heroes, while their own guns mow down enemy soldiers like fields of wheat... We know that Burton's grim composure mostly comes from his being hung over and exhausted with filmmaking overall, but it fits his character perfectly.....
Halfway through the film, MacLean detonates multiple plot twists that would stagger Agatha Christie.....but don't worry, Clint Eastwood handily resolves all these confusing complications by taking most of the supporting cast off the playing board, so to speak. (One guy we wish had stuck around to the end: the black-uniformed Gestapo slimeball, a strutting, curly blonde-haired Aryan stud, Siegrfried reborn, wonderfully played by Derren Nesbitt....)
To MGM's chagrin, the surefire recipe of Burton, Eastwood and Alistair MacLean high adventure stirred up only modest box office results.......especially troubling since the studio had yet another big-budget, high profile Clint Eastwood war movie in the pipeline for the following year....how could such a movie be made palatable to moviegoers who stayed away from the old fashioned heroics and stirring bravery of "Where Eagles Dare"?
Enter "Kelly's Heroes", pumped up and re-fitted with modern day sarcasm, casual immorality and a wildly anachronistic characterm seemingly dropped into the movie from the Woodstock music festival.....
Forget the stirring music.....the opening firefights get scored with a bubbly pop tune contributed by MGM's new music director Mike Curb.....(his mission: insert wildly inappropriate songs into as many studio films as he could ruin..)
Forget any patriotic quest to win the war.....Eastwood and cohorts Telly Savalas and Don Rickles go behind enemy lines in France strictly to loot a bank of its 16 millions dollars in gold bars. They wipe out mass quantities of Germans......but that's only because the Germans have the temerity to stand between our amoral heroes and the golden stash. ....
And for those who craved a more hip approach to war than "Where Eagles Dare", the movie delivers its oddball wild card........a character named, oddly enough... Oddball, a 1960's laid back hippie jammed into this movie like the ultimate square peg pounded into a round hole. Played with full San Francisco Haight-Ashbury helium by Donald Sutherland, Oddball decries anyone who gives him 'negative waves' while commanding tank assaults on German positions.
We guess we're supposed to root for these guys to grab their gold because.....well, they're our guys......and we're encouraged to laugh at the blowhard general (Carol O'Conner, playing virtually the same role from "What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?") who mistakenly thinks our guys penetrated the German lines to help the war effort. Hah.....fat chance, sucker.
And so there you had MGM's all new reconditioned overhaul of a World War 2 movie, spiffed up with hippies, pop tunes and a we're-just-in-it-for-the-money lead characters....welcome to the 70's. (We'll say this much for 'Kelly's Heroes'.....for those of us sick of unreal CGI, the film offers the simple pleasures of watching lots of stuff really get blown up.....and blown up real good......
For the gloriously unbelievable but played ramrod straight "Where Eagles Dare", we'll always award 4 stars (****).......but for "Kelly's Heroes", a ragtag collection of desperate MGM marketing strategies posing as a war movie, we'll barely scrape up 1 &1/2 stars) (* & 1/2)
..
No comments:
Post a Comment