Shepherd Sanders | Through the Shattered Lens

1970’s Kelly’s Heroes takes place in France during the Second World War. The American army is moving through the country, liberating it town-by-town. Private Kelly (Clint Eastwood) is a former lieutenant who was busted down in rank after leading a disastrous raid on the wrong hill. (It was the fault of the generals but Lt. Kelly was set up as a scapegoat.) When Kelly learns that the Germans are hiding a huge amount of gold in an occupied town, he gathers together a team of weary soldiers, misfits all, and plans to go AWOL to steal the gold for themselves.

Kelly’s Heroes was one of the big budget studio films that Eastwood made after finding stardom in Europe with Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti westerns. This is very much an ensemble film, in the vein of The Dirty Dozen. Indeed, Eastwood’s co-star, Telly Savalas, was in The Dirty Dozen. Here, Savalas plays Big Joe, the sergeant who isn’t sure that he wants to put his men in danger for gold that may or may not exist. Don Rickles plays Crapshoot who is …. well, imagine Don Rickles in the middle of World War II and you have a pretty good idea of who Crapshoot is. Stuart Margolin, Harry Dean Stanton, Perry Lopez, Gavin MacLeod shows up as soldiers. Carroll O’Connor plays the bombastic general who mistakes Kelly’s attempts to go AWOL for a brilliant tactical maneuver, Like all of the senior officers in this film, O’Connor’s general is a buffoon. Kelly’s Heroes was made during the Vietnam War and, much like Patton (released the same year), it attempts to appeal to both the establishment and the counterculture by making the heroes soldiers but their bosses jerks.

And that brings us to Donald Sutherland, who plays a tank commander named Oddball. You may not have know this but apparently, there were hippies in the 40s! Actually, I don’t think that’s true but there’s really no other way to describe Oddball than as a Hollywood hippie. He’s a blissed-out, spacey guy who thinks nothing of accidnetally driving his tank through a building. The films ask us to believe that the long-haired and bearded Oddball is a World War II tank commander and Sutherland is such a likable presence that it’s temping to just go with it. Oddball was obviously included to bring in “the kids” but he does generate some needed laughs. This is a very long movie and the comedic moments are appreciated.

Kelly’s Heroes is two-and-a-half hours long and it definitely could have been shorter. Director Brian Hutton allows some scenes to drag on for a bit too long and he sometimes struggles to balance the moments of comedy with the moments of violent drama (quite a few character dies) but he does get good performances from his ensemble. Eastwood’s taciturn acting style is nicely matched with Savalas’s more expressive style and it’s hard not smile at Don Rickles, insulting everyone as if they were guests at Joe Gallo’s birthday party. The film, at times, doesn’t seem to know if it wants to be a satire or a straight heist film but the cast keep things watchable. Eastwood even gets to show a few hints of the dry sense of humor that always hid behind the perpetually bad mood that often seemed to hang over him in his early films. Whatever flaws the film may have, it was a box office success. One year after this release of Kelly’s Heroes, Eastwood would make history as Dirty Harry.

After watching Witness For The Prosecution, I continued TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar by watching the 1966 Best Picture nominee, The Sand Pebbles.

Considering that The Sand Pebbles is close to four hours long, it’s interesting how little there is to really say about it. Taking place in 1926, The Sand Pebbles follows the crew of the USS San Pablo, a gunboat that patrols the Yangtze River in China. The San Pablo is there to protect American business interests, which are in particular danger because China is caught up in a communist revolution. For the most part, the crew of the San Pablo are portrayed as being lazy and racist. They have little interest in understanding the culture of the people around them and they use Chinese laborer to do the work on the boat.

When Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) is transferred to the San Pablo, he upsets his fellow crewmen by insisting on working in the ship’s engine room himself, the fear being that if Holman is willing to work then the rest of them will be expected to work as well. The ship’s commander, Lt. Collins (Richard Crenna), views Holman as being a threat to morale and starts to make plans to get Holman off of his boat. But, first, the boat is going to have to get out of China…

The Sand Pebbles is an episodic film and some of those episodes are more interesting than others. Typically, an episode will start out positively and then end with some sudden tragedy. For instance, Holman trains one laborer (Mako) to be a boxer and then watches as he beats the most racist crewman on the ship. However, just a few minutes later, the laborer is captured and savagely tortured by the communists and Holman is forced to perform a mercy killing.

In another subplot, Holman’s only friend, Frenchy (Richard Attenborough), marries a local prostitute (Emmanuelle Arsan, who would later write an autobiography that would serve as the basis for a very different type of film). However, in order to see his wife, Frenchy has to continually swim to shore in the middle of the night. Frenchy soon develops pneumonia and dies while his wife is dragged off and apparently executed.

And finally, Holman strikes up a romance with Shirley Eckert (Candice Bergen), an innocent missionary. However, when her arrogant and naive boss, Jameson (Larry Gates), refuses to leave the country despite the revolution, the San Pablo is ordered to rescue them. This, of course, leads to a final battle with the communists which leaves a good deal of the cast dead.

As I watched The Sand Pebbles, my main impression was that it was an extremely long movie. The film’s climatic battle was exciting and Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the director of 12 Years A Slave and Shame) gave a good performance but otherwise, the film often seemed to drag. While the movie’s theme of Americans struggling (and failing) to understand another country’s culture had a definite resonance, The Sand Pebbles did not seem to be quite sure what it truly wanted to say about it.

Let’s face it — over 500 films have been nominated for best picture. And, while a good deal of them hold up surprisingly well and are still entertaining to watch, there’s also a handful like The Sand Pebbles, ambitious films that never quite reached their potential but were probably nominated because they seemed like the type of epic film that should be nominated. Many of these films were nominated and a few even won.

However, in the case of The Sand Pebbles, a nomination would have to be enough. That year, the Oscar for Best Picture was won by A Man For All Seasons.