Remember THE television drama of the 2000s, The Shield? In case you are not familiar with the show, it casts Michael Chiklis and Walter Goggins as the two main members of a Strike Team that is filthy corrupt, but you cannot help yourself to root for them because beneath all the shades of gray and money they put off to the side, they are still cops at heart and looking out for the greater good, no matter which side of the fence they may fall on. Kind of also like Dexter.
Bringing this back to Clint Eastwood, the third movie of the ten I am covering in his BluRay collection, Kelly's Heroes from 1970 (trailer) reminded me quite a bit of the central plot that ran across the second season of The Shield. In the second season, the Strike Team are making a routine bust on a gang of Armenians when they stumble into plans of the Armenian's legendary "money train" making a upcoming stop in the area. The whole remainder of the second season is the Strike Team setting up a private operation on the side to rob the money train in the heist of heists, and by the time of the season finale you could not help but be on the edge of your seat to see if they pulled off the heist. If you have not seen The Shield yet, I just saw all the seasons on sale at Best Buy for $10 each, go buy them now!
I can see where the writers of The Shield may have been inspired, because at the beginning of Kelly's Heroes, Eastwood's character, Kelly is interrogating a captured Nazi colonel. Kelly gets him drunk to the point of spilling the beans on a relatively weak division guarding a bank that contains over $14 million in gold. And this is in the 1940s, so who knows what inflation brings that up to today, I am abysmal in math so I will not even attempt to figure it out. Obviously you see where this is going as Kelly assembles a ragtag bunch of soldiers in a private operation of their own to rob the bank!
Kelly leads quite the cast of misfits featuring Don Rickles as Sgt. Crapgame who is always second guessing Kelly's commands and Donald Sutherland as Sgt. Oddball, who is quite the peculiar character to say the least, and Sutherland is a riot to watch in this type of character I have never seen him portray before! The film is quite long at nearly two and a half hours, but the setup and journey they go on for building up to the heist is well paced, and much like the second season finale of The Shield, I was completely glued in by the time they were ready to start the raid on the German bank. It brought back memories as a kid watching old World War II movies and getting all psyched up whenever a battle would break out, hey I guess that is what Kelly's Heroes is, but it is a damn good one to say the least.
This came out only two years later the last Clint movie I covered, Where Eagles Dare, but it holds up much better. I am no film expert, but compared to the previous film, I really like how this is shot and the overall cinematography is better all together, and I rarely seemed to be pulled out of the movie with dated special effects and camera tricks like I was a few times with Where Eagles Dare. It is weird, I always remember Eastwood as having a rep for his older films being classic westerns, but the oldest two movies in this collection are awesome World War II films, with at least one more to come later on with Letters from Iwo Jima. Of course I highly recommend this film, it is on Netflix, but through disc rental only. Amazon has it available in a ton of various collections on DVD and BluRay for pretty cheap as well. If you want to keep along with the same collection I am watching, Amazon has the 10 film BluRay collection going for $40 right now.
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