WARNING: SPOILERS

Is there a more incongruous moment in a guy’s-guy WWII movie than the opening to this one?

It’s a rain-soaked night in Nazi-occupied Europe and we’re witnessing a traffic jam as officials search and question cars trying to get through. Our titular hero, Pvt. Kelly (Clint Eastwood), sits in a Jeep, seeming to hold a German officer hostage. An official with some authority comes by, barking orders, sees Kelly, does a doubletake, and starts shouting in German. That’s when Kelly guns the engines, crashes through a barrier, and as the chase begins, on the soundtrack, we get a military drumroll that shifts, subtly, quickly, and absurdly, into the worst kind of 1970 fluff-rock imaginable—a song called “Burning Bridges” by Mike Curb Congregation. Imagine if the Brady Kids were overtly Christian. Imagine if Up With People wrote their own songs.

Friends all tried to warn me but I held my head up high
All the time they warned me but I only passed them by
They all tried to tell me but I guess I didn't care
I turned my back and left them standing there

In subsequent verses a friend tries to find the dude a job, a girl throws him a party, and years pass before he realizes “I guess I should have listened to my friends.” Reminder: This is playing over scenes in Nazi-occupied France. In a Clint Eastwood movie! With Telly Savalas!

And they repeat it. Good god. The song is reprised halfway through and over the closing credits. You know that look Clint Eastwood gives other characters in movies—like he can’t believe this idiot is still talking? That.

Hockey puck
A lot changed in this movie during its inception. The movie’s original title was “The Warriors” and its original director Don Siegel. It originally had an overt anti-war, or anti-Army, or anti-corporate message—part of the appeal to Eastwood, believe it or not, who never thought much of his time in the service. Plus its studio, MGM, changed hands two times during its making. Per Richard Schickel’s excellent Eastwood bio:

The picture had been green-lighted by a management team headed by Robert O’Brien. But then control of the studio’s parent company, Loewe’s Inc., was acquired by Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Seagrams, whose new managers tried to turn this into a backlot picture. … By the time they were in active production, controlling interest in the studio had been acquired by Kirk Kirkorian, the corporate raider, who installed James Aubrey as head of production.

Meaning the people in charge at the end didn’t have a stake in the final product. Which might explain Mike Curb Congregation.

It’s still a liked movie. Among the movies Brian G. Hutton directed, it’s tied with an earlier Eastwood flick, “Where Eagles Dare,” for highest IMDb user rating: 7.6. Nothing else Hutton directed is above 7.0. (Neither of those Eastwood flicks deserves that high a rating, btw.)

I certainly like the idea of combining a war flick with a heist flick; and it’s a helluva cast— particularly for someone like me who came of age in the 1970s. This might’ve been my explanation of the movie back then:

Near the end of WWII, Dirty Harry finds out there’s a ton of gold in a bank across enemy lines, so he convinces Kojak and the hockey puck guy from Dean Martin roasts to use the Army to get it—and without the knowledge of Gen. Archie Bunker. But the movie version of Hawkeye Pierce overhears, and he’s a tank guy, which they’ll need, and he brings along his right-hand man—Murray Slaughter from “Mary Tyler Moore.” Oh, the “Love American Style” guy is in for the ride, too.

Add Lt. Escobar from “Chinatown,” Uncle Leo from “Seinfeld,” James Dean’s brother from “East of Eden,” and Harry Dean Stanton, and you’ve got yourself a party.

It takes a while to get that party going, but once they’re moving it’s not bad—though, to be honest, Eastwood doesn’t have much to do. You know who pops? Telly Savalas and Don Rickles. They should’ve done nothing but war movies (or heist movies) for the rest of the ’70s. Rickles is the supply sergeant—perfect—while Savalas is the Master Sergeant who doesn’t want to endanger the men. Savalas had a thing. You believe him in the role.

You know who I didn’t believe? Donald Sutherland’s Sgt. Oddball. Per IMDb trivia, the movie has a ton of verisimilitude: this gun is accurate, that tank maybe, they’re part of the 35th Infantry in Sept. 1944 near Nancy, France, which is exactly where the 35th Infantry was in Sept. 1944. And then they give us this hippy with long hair and a beard who talks about negative vibes and calls everyone “baby.” What the hell? And what accent is Sutherland doing anyway?

The enemy is less Nazis than the U.S. military high command. We know Kelly was a lieutenant who was scapegoated and busted back to private, and we know the 35th is led by the nephew to Gen. Colt (Carroll O’Connor), a guy named Capt. Maitland (Hal Buckley), who is spending his time trying to ship a yacht back home. Meanwhile, they cut a German tank commander in on the action. He’s more them than American brass.

My favorite scene is the one where Gen. Colt and his immediates overhear Kelly’s team making their way to Clermont, France, each paranoid that the other is going to beat them to the gold, and Colt takes this as the opposite of what it is—a splendid example of the American fighting spirit and rushes to join them. That made me laugh out loud.

I was intrigued by the “Good, Bad and Ugly” homage, too. Near the end, three of our principles, including Kelly, guns at the ready, face off against the remaining Tiger tank in the village square, while a very Ennio Moricone riff plays on the soundtrack. It makes no sense within the film—why risk their lives in this manner?—but outside the film it’s fascinating. We’re only three years removed from Leone’s film, but apparently the scene was already iconic enough to allow for this. And the scene is only grown in stature.

Most everything goes according to plan: the townspeople think they’ve been liberated, the Gen. arrives to take credit, our guys make off with the dough.

I would’ve liked the more overt antiwar message, though. Per Schickel:

In general Clint felt [after extensive edits] that the film’s comedy now played too broadly, and specifically he was dismayed at the excision of a transition scene between the picture’s second and third acts in which, as he recalls, he and the character played by Telly Savalas “just sort of summed up the philosophy of these loose ends, and what the war had done to them.” He goes so far as to say that “its soul was taken out, a little bit of its soul was robbed.”

Probably helped it get robbed at the box office, too. In 1970, after 5-7 years of Vietnam playing on the nightly news, America was ready for antiwar messages, and flocked to see them. The third highest-grossing film of 1970 was Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H,” grossing more than $500 million, adjusted for inflation; the fourth, “Patton,” grossed $350+ million. “Kelly’s Heroes,” despite its cast and star, didn’t make the top 25.

More than ever
Has anyone done a study of how WWII movies changed over the years? How they looked during the war, in its immediate aftermath, and during the Cold War? How Vietnam changed them and how Reagan changed them back? I see there are books out there, I’m just curious if any are good. 

And does anyone know much about Mike Curb? A cursory look around the Web, and on newspapers.com, reveals he was not only an anodyne Christian rocker but such a conservative force that he wrote Nixon’s 1972 campaign song, “Nixon Now (More Than Ever).” He and the Congregation performed at the Jan. 1973 inaugural, along with the likes of Pat Boone, the Les Brown Orchestra, Ray Stevens and Hank Williams, Jr. And then he ran for lieutenant governor of California! And won! That was in 1978, just as the conservative movement was gathering steam, but Curb couldn’t turn it to his advantage. In 1982 he shot too high, running for governor but losing the GOP nom to George Deukmejian. He tried for looie again in’86. Lost.

Per Wiki, he got involved in auto racing. He bought the house Elvis lived in before Graceland. He became a philanthropist. Most online bios sing his praises. The singing sounds like “Burning Bridges.”

Mike Curb (at Yamaha upright) and his Congregation sing the title song. Nothing speaks to Nazi-occupied Europe more.