Please observe that we’re discussing why it’s a masterpiece. If you’re still wondering if it’s a masterpiece, you’re obviously lost and need to hit the back button on your browser a few times to get back to safety. It is. We’re only here to analyze the why.

We have to put aside the fact that it’s funny. It was obviously supposed to be funny. They put Don Rickles in it, for instance. I’ve seen a short list of the scenes that were edited out of the movie. It’s pretty obvious that KH was intended to be the Animal House of Hohenzollern. The out-edits mostly involved girls with their shirts off and assorted other 70s bilge. The Ingrid Pitt Breast Delivery System was hired to bring some sort of incongruous feminine presence, but she was laid off before they even started filming. Like many good movies, its sounds like the producers tried to ruin the venture as hard as they could, but couldn’t manage it.

Clint Eastwood leads the cast. He’s always been a replacement for John Wayne in the firmament of Hollywood. He just plays himself, over and over, just like the Duke did. It doesn’t matter whether he’s driving around with an orangutan in a pickup truck, or with Donald Sutherland barking like a dog in a Sherman tank, Clint the Squint is just Clint. Complaining about Clint’s acting style is like getting up a petition to put Franklin Pierce on Mount Rushmore instead of one of the Borglund four. Clint might not know a Strasberg from a Starbucks, but he knows what he’s about. Try imagining anyone else as Kelly in this role. Kelly has to appear stoic, stolid, fearless, formidable, a man to be followed. Actors who can project that are always in short supply. And he wasn’t afraid to sort of poke fun at his carefully cultivated image, if the moment called for it. Here’s the spaghetti western meeting the German deli:

Telly Savalas has a big part in the show. He was supposed to be George Kennedy. George wanted too much money to be in the movie, so they got Kojak. He turned out to be perfect for the job. Once again, the producers won by losing. The movie would have been diminished some if you replaced Telly’s bald pate with Kennedy’s combover, but it’s not like they were trying to hire Don Knotts. It wouldn’t have been a trainwreck. Without Clint, the premiere would have been held at a drive-in.

Hollywood has always been full of actors that don’t, ahem, know their limitations. Another giant slab of beef, Charlton Heston, never knew enough to stick to his knitting, and embarrassed himself numerous times by trying to act in things, instead of standing in the right spot, remembering his lines, and avoiding knocking over the furniture. Clint has never made that mistake.

Donald Sutherland steals the picture, of course, with his oddball Oddball character. It was completely misunderstood at the time, and even moreso now. Everyone describes him and his crew as hippies, which they find incongruous in a story that includes a mention of Omaha Beach not once, but twice. It’s the result of two errors. First, they assumed that everyone came home from the war, kept their crewcuts,  got a job making cars with fins, and had 2.3 children and a dog to kick. But just like after WWI, lots of WWII vets had trouble fitting in after the war, and were quite bohemian, if not downright criminal. The Wild One is one example of that sort of man. Oddball and his ilk are another. He isn’t a hippie. He’s not even a proto-hippie if you ask me. He’s a Beat Generation free spirit all the way. Hell, what hippie ever listened to country music, whether he’s flattening a railroad crossing in a tank, or not? The Beat Generation worshiped idiosyncrasy for its own sake, just like Oddball’s crew. There has never been a more lockstep bunch than the hippies.

That’s the second error. To the modern eye, hippies were a new phenomenon, peculiar to the late sixties and pre-disco seventies. Nonsense. It was a warmed over fad. Hell, Germany had hippies wandering around the Black Forest, who called themselves wandervogel. They liked to commune with nature in the woods while singing folk songs, and had been doing it since the 19th century. After Charlie Chaplin’s accession to Fuhrer, they were either invited to become Hitler jugend or were directed to commune with nature more closely, as mulch. At any rate, the Greatest Generation had a lot more variation than how they’re usually portrayed, and the generations who followed had a lot less.

So the movie doesn’t really rely on comic relief. Comedy is a strand woven right through it. It’s not a series of rest areas on the usual highway to shooting other people, and blowing stuff up. It’s funny, but the premise of the movie, a bank robbery that’s quasi-legal because the bank is behind a shifting dotted line on a military map, sounds more outrageous than any number of more staid WWII movies. The problem is, it’s a true story. Some soldiers from various armies robbed a NAZI bank and made off with lots of gold, almost none of which was subsequently recovered. Kelly’s Heroes, which is supposed to be a romp, might have more truth in it than one of those slavish war movies with the Germans floating on a cushion of subtitles.

The miracles in the movie’s production are legion. The director was Brian G. Hutton, who wasn’t exactly David Lean. He was a bit actor for a while, before he decided it was easier to sit in a sling chair with his name on it. He’d just got finished making Where Eagles Dare in ’68, so he was a natural to put an x in gaffer’s tape on the floor and point Clint towards it.

It’s fun to compare WED to KH, since they share so many details in their productions and cast. Where Eagles Dare made a small fortune, but it’s a really dumb movie. It’s dumb fun, but admit it, it’s really dumb. There isn’t any comedy in it, but it’s very funny accidentally. Richard Burton is completely miscast, yelling his lines like drunken Hamlet, while stolid Clint just sort of glares at him and wonders why he doesn’t just say the lines. The plot is like fourteen war/spy movies put in a Cuisinart and put back together as a papier-mache movie. All the German soldiers are basically NPCs who throw their arms straight up and fall over a second or two before one of the heroes shoots them. It’s a hoot.

So Brian tried again, and got it exactly right this time. He left Burton at the happy hour drink rail, took Clint to Yugoslavia, and blew up more of the country than the Allies and the Wehrmacht ever did. The second-rate actors were all first-rate. The battle scenes are better than Saving Private Ryan by a long shot. The campfire scenes mostly show guys as they are, believably pensive, tired, and tongue-tied, instead of exposition factories. Their dumbfounded, silent expressions when their fellows are killed have more pathos in them than any ten anti-war movies. And their motivations are completely believable, instead of the usual supermen charging at machine guns to die for freedom words.

It’s a masterpiece. So watch it again. Don’t worry about being bored because you know how it turns out. Have a little faith, baby.