Kelly’s Heroes: The argument that refuses to go away
I was reading a story last year (in July), an old story that seems to have legs and refuses to go away. It concerns the post production of Kelly’s Heroes and the final cut. The whole argument is centred around the film’s original ‘message’ which Eastwood argues was completely lost and instead was turned into a routine wartime comedy heist movie.
I didn’t post this story in July, but just lately (Jan 2026) there was another story, a follow up by the same writer which was linked to the same story that also appeared on the web.
So, I’ve decided to post both of these stories here now as I think it is something that still holds a great deal of interest.
I personally have mixed feelings about it. As an audience we have only been privy to the release cut, we have only ever known it as a straight forward, comedy heist movie - but it’s Eastwood’s argument that leaves us all in a state of wonder and the thought of what might have been? Don’t get me wrong, I actually love Kelly’s Heroes just as it is, imo, it’s a fine piece of entertainment - which I might add, did quite well at the box office.
How can we, the audience, ever be in a position to compare and contrast any alternative? Eastwood of course, is a different matter - he’s the star and as such is actively involved in the production - so we are only involved by observing and listening to those arguments presented by Eastwood. I think it’s fair to say that we are never going to see an alternative cut of the film. Why would they? The version we have is the version we are only ever going to have. So I guess we have to accept it for what it is - and that’s just fine by me.
I just hope that Clint doesn't reflect on Kelly’s Heroes with too much regret. The film remains a fan favourite. I just don’t want to see the man openly criticise the movie simply because it fell short of ‘his’ original expectations. As I said, we, the audience, were never privy to any other viewpoint - we simply judge on what we see and what we are presented with.
The Clint Eastwood movie ruined by studio politics: “They’re going to hate this goddamn film”
Scott Campbell
Thu 10 July 2025
Actors don’t have much say in what happens to a movie once the cameras have stopped rolling and it enters post-production, but Clint Eastwood still tried to state a case for trying to save a film he believed was being ruined by too many grubby fingerprints at studio level.
At the time, he still hadn’t made his directorial debut and hadn’t diversified his input by producing any of his pictures either, meaning there was nothing he could do about it. After all, he was only an actor for hire who was paid to perform their part and leave it at that, not that it prevented him from trying anyway.
He was a big enough star that filmmakers would listen to his suggestions and take some of them on board in the hopes of improving the end product, but Eastwood’s influence didn’t stretch as far as the boardroom, who continually ignored his pleas to maintain the spirit of the story that convinced him to sign on for 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes in the first place.
Director Brian G Wilson’s (? Hutton's) ensemble war dramedy turned a profit at the box office and earned strong reviews, so it’s not as if the movie was butchered. Still, the leading man wanted more from what emerged on the silver screen as a fairly by-the-numbers tale of a ragtag group of soldiers going AWOL to head behind enemy lines during World War II and heist Nazi gold from a French bank.
“This thing had been completely dehumanised,” he ranted to Paul Nelson. “It’d just become a massive action thing in which the special effects were great and there was a lot of action. But there was too much action. There needed to be some reason for this whole caper being there.”
When he asked then-MGM boss Jim Aubrey if a deleted scene could be put back into Kelly’s Heroes, he was told no because a premiere screening had already been arranged. When he asked if the first showing could be delayed so he could work on the edit to make it better, he was also told no, leaving Eastwood increasingly frustrated.
“Forget the critics,” he told Aubrey. “They’re going to hate this goddamn film anyway. Let’s put the movie back in its proper order so at least it has a fair chance, so that the critics might see something, or anybody might see something. The audience, mainly.” Once more, his request was denied.
To make matters worse, MGM was in a constant state of transition. Eastwood explained that Bob O’Brien was the president when he first became attached to Kelly’s Heroes, who was then replaced by Louis F Polk, who was himself usurped by Aubrey, “So it started under one regime and was released two regimes later.”
From his perspective, MGM “needed the dough real fast,” and the best way to do that was to rush the movie into cinemas and ignore his constant petitions to try and improve the film. It wasn’t a disaster by any stretch, but it might well have been vastly superior had Eastwood gotten his way.
The “dumb” movie that left Clint Eastwood “incensed”: “I had no control over that thing”
Scott Campbell
Sat 10 January 2026
Other than the fact he’d always fancied working on the other side of the camera, one of the main reasons why Clint Eastwood was so keen to develop and direct his own projects was so that he didn’t have to work with idiots anymore. If he called the shots, then there’d be nobody else to blame but him.
He had to bide his time, though, and it wouldn’t be until his 23rd appearance in a feature that he made his directorial debut. Even at that, he’d scratched and clawed for over a decade just to keep his head above water, with Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy the catalyst for his ascent to stardom.
Once he’d returned from his international jaunt, producers did what producers do and offered Eastwood every western under the sun. He wasn’t too enthusiastic at the prospect, even if Hang ‘Em High was worth it, but the actor’s desire to subvert his screen persona backfired horrendously when he thought making Paint Your Wagon would be a good idea.
If he wasn’t being offered westerns, then he was being bombarded with action scripts, so he zagged when everyone wanted to zig and agreed to headline Kelly’s Heroes. The 1970 wartime caper isn’t one of his best, and Eastwood wasn’t a happy camper after fighting the production every step of the way.
“They had a thing called Hogan’s Heroes, very popular on television, and so they come out with Kelly’s Heroes, which is a dumb title,” he declared. “I had no control over that thing, not that I have any better taste than anybody else, but I wouldn’t liked (? Would like) to have done that movie with a little more control.”
Unfortunately, he was just an actor for hire, so nobody in a position of power gave a shit what he thought. “It’s an alright picture,” he conceded. “I’m not putting it down, I just think it could have been a very, very good movie with a little something added special. It was one of the best anti-war stories I’ve ever seen, but it was subtle, it was never preachy. But all that was taken out.”
He didn’t like the title, he didn’t like the way the film had been edited, and he thought the studio had butchered Kelly’s Heroes beyond recognition. To make matters worse, MGM was in a state of transition between new owners after suffering financial difficulties, and the new regime wasn’t interested in listening to any of his suggestions for how to improve the end product.
“That’s another thing that got me incensed,” Eastwood acknowledged. “After spending six months on the road and living out of a suitcase in Yugoslavia, which isn’t bad, it’s a pretty country and everything, then you come back and some jerk sells the picture because he’s taken over a studio that’s broke and wants to make a lot of low-budget films.”
Despite his protests, the movie made money at the box office and scored strong reviews. In another saving grace, it was Eastwood’s penultimate film shoot before his career changed forever; after wrapping The Beguiled in mid-1970, the following year was his most definitive yet, with his directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, and Dirty Harry releasing six and a half weeks apart.
For some context, here’s an original review from The New York Times, June 24th, 1970.
The Screen: Hutton's ‘Kelly's Heroes’ Begins Run
“Kelly's Heroes,” therefore, is not without its problems. But it is very largely without viable solutions to them. Not without resources—it is full of resources, natural and mostly untapped—but without that resourcefulness necessary to persuade us that comedy, any comedy, is worth the time of day.
Set during the Allied advance across France, “Kelly's Heroes” concerns a group of non-coms and private soldiers who learning that the Ger mans have stored gold bullion worth many millions in a town bank not far behind their own front lines (the logic of this escapes me), open up their own little panzer attack in order to steal it. The film divides its attention more or less equally between the logistics of the heist (the sine qua non of caper movies) and the heroics of the mission.
In leading the heroics, Kelly's heroes turn in performances that range from mod relevance (Donald Sutherland) to self‐parody (Clint Eastwood), with samples of stand‐up comedy (Don Rickles) and exasperated expediency (Telly Savalas) in between. Of the principals I liked only Telly Savalas, who builds the first sergeant, a predictable role, into a characterization that would grace a much funnier or more serious movie.
Donald Sutherland, on the other hand, has put together not so much a characterization as a first aid package. A hippie tank driver who has established a commune at the front and who digs beautiful people, etc., he is not only an anachronism by at least 25 years, but also an anachronism whose only purpose is to help this movie make the scene. Deprived of any real context, the ticks and attitudinizing of his performance seem not so much a means of expression as of self-defence.
Clint Eastwood, who is not generally a funny man, plays with a quiet thin‐lipped determination of such withdrawn ferocity—as if he was a kind of Gary Cooper whose essence had not just pre ceded but utterly superseded his existence — that you would expect his goal to be murder rather than money.
The aim is money, but much murder is committed in its pursuit, and something goes not merely dull but terribly wrong with “Kelly's Heroes” along the way. De tailed and impressive in its bomb bursts, demolitions, and other special effects, it is greatly concerned with the pleasures of war. While the tanks advance and buildings crumble and bridges collapse and the dialogue remains at the level of a shouted “All right! Move out!” (as it mostly does), the movie partakes of good clean scary fun.
But when men are killed, and a lot of men are killed, many Germans, a few Americans, the balance alters to the horrors of war. To ac knowledge its deaths the film has no resources above the conventional antagonistic ironies and, comradely pieties of most war movies. And since its subject is not war, but burglary masquerading as war, the easy acceptance of the masquerade—which is apparently quite beyond the film's control—becomes a denial of moral perception that depresses the mind and bewilders the imagination. “Kelly's Heroes” seem big, expensive, loud and innocuous. I don't think it is so innocuous.
It's a story with questions, no doubt about it, personally, I think I like the film just as it is - we live with it despite what hidden issues there might have been.
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