.
Kelly’s
Heroes
Jack
Film
is based upon a true incident.
The caper was covered in a book called “Nazi Gold: The Sensational Story of the
World’s Greatest Robbery – and the Greatest Criminal Cover-Up” by Ian Sayer
and Douglas Botting.
The
heist was perpetrated by a combination of renegade Nazi and American officers.
It
was also listed as the “biggest” robbery ever in the Guinness Book of Records,
in the 1960s.
In
1945, as Allied bombers continued their final pounding of Berlin, the panicking
Nazis began moving the assets of the Reichsbank south for safekeeping.
Vast
trainloads of gold and currency were evacuated from the doomed capital of
Hitler’s ‘Thousand-year Reich’.
Nazi Gold is the
real-life story of the theft of that fabulous treasure – worth some
2,500,000,000 at the time of the original investigation.
It is also the story
of a mystery and attempted whitewash in an American scandal that pre-dated
Watergate by nearly 30 years.
Investigators were
impeded at every step as they struggled to uncover the truth and were left
fearing for their lives.
The
authors’ quest led them to a murky, dangerous post-war world of racketeering,
corruption and gang warfare.
Their
brilliant reporting, matching eyewitness testimony with declassified Top Secret
documents from the US Archives, lays bare this monumental crime in a narrative
which throngs with SS desperadoes, a red-headed queen of crime and American
military governors living like Kings.
Also
revealed is the authors’ discovery of some of the missing treasure in the Bank
of England. Douglas Botting (Author), Ian Sayer (Author).
So let’s have a look as some more bizarre trivia from a
fantastic film:
Donald
Sutherland became seriously ill during filming on location in Yugoslavia. His
wife received a telegram telling her to come immediately but warning her that
he would probably be dead before she arrived.
The noise made by
electric motors of the Tigers’ turrets was later used for the movements of the
power lifters in Aliens (1986).
It was during
shooting in Yugoslavia 1969, that Donald Sutherland received word, via co-star
Clint Eastwood, that his then-wife Shirley Douglas was arrested for trying to
buy hand-grenades for the Black Panthers with a personal cheque from an
undercover FBI agent.
Sutherland recounts
this story often, mentioning that when Eastwood got to the part about the
personal cheque, he laughed so hard, he fell to his knees, and Sutherland had
to help him up.
Eastwood then put
his arm around Sutherland and walked him down the hill that overlooked the
Yugoslav countryside, assuring his friend with complete support of his
predicament.
Sutherland and
Douglas, who are the parents of Kiefer and twin sister Rachel Sutherland, later
divorced in 1970.
The movie was mainly
filmed in Yugoslavia because the Yugoslavian army still had a large quantity of
Sherman tanks in 1970.
The
“Tiger” tanks used in the film were actually Russian T-34 tanks which had been
specially modified to look like Tiger tanks.
This
is apparent when you look at the suspension of the tanks (T-34s used a modified
Christie suspension, whereas the Tigers’ wheels were much more elaborate.)
The German Tiger tank commander (played by Karl-Otto Alberty)
appears to be a parody – both in appearance and manner of speaking – of Marlon
Brando’s portrayal of German Lt. Christian Diestl in The Young Lions (1958).
In
the nineties, a group of Swedish war game enthusiasts started to build a 1/72
scale model of the town, where the robbery takes place.
As
they pursued accuracy they even traveled to Vizinada and in fact hired a pilot
and plane to get aerial photos of the town.
Croatian
authorities thought they were foreign spies and arrested them. Reportedly, they
were released after a couple of hours.
A record was made of Clint Eastwood singing “Burning Bridges”,
the theme song from the film.
It was released as a 45-rpm disc on Certron Records, catalog
#C-10010, produced by Dickey Lee and Allen Reynolds (with the B-side of “When I
Loved Her” also sung by Eastwood, and written by Kris Kristofferson).
The
blue “crosshair” shoulder patch indicates Kelly and his men are from the 35th
Infantry Division. It’s a National Guard Division, comprised of Guardsmen from
Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas.
Artillery sergeant Mulligan has a humorous name.
In golf, a “mulligan” is a “do-over”; a chance to repeat a bad
shot. In the film, Sgt. Mulligan is repeatedly berated for his inaccuracy.
John
Landis was a production assistant on this film. He also appears as an extra (he
was one of the three nuns).
The ‘key’ symbol on the Tiger tanks denotes that they are
attached to the 1st SS Panzer Division “Leibstandarte (Body guard unit) Adolf
Hitler.”
14,000 gold bars,
valued at $16M, equals about $1,143 per bar.
At the long-standing
price of $35/troy ounce, the bars would have had to weigh only 32.6 oz (almost
36 oz avoirdupois) each–probably a gross understatement, even though the bars
are clearly much smaller than the standard “Fort Knox” size.
But even assuming
the weight is correct, 14,000 bars would weigh almost 16 tons (not counting
boxes, men and equipment)–well beyond the capacity of the truck they were
using.
Then again (still
with me, folks?), 14,000 bars, at only 12 to a box, would require over 1,100
boxes-seemingly a lot more than is in the pile.
So maybe the German
colonel was wrong.
The American fighter-plane that attacks Kellys group, is
actually an Yugoslav “Ikarus Type 522” trainer, that flew for the first time in
1955.
Kelly,
Big Joe and the other recon soldiers wear the shoulder patch of the 35th
Infantry Division, which was fighting in the area of Nancy, France, in late summer
1944.
Clint Eastwood signed to do the film mainly because his friend
and favorite director, Don Siegel, was set to direct it.
However, Siegel ran into post-production problems while
finishing up Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and had to withdraw from the
project.
Brian G. Hutton was then signed to direct. Eastwood, who had
already signed a contract to do the film, couldn’t pull out.
Oddball’s
division is the “Super Sixth”, the 6th Armored Division.
Mike Curb, who wrote the lyrics to the movie’s theme song
“Burning Bridges,” served as lieutenant governor of California between 1978 and
1982.
A
gold bar of 400 Troy ounces would measure roughly 2 inches x 3 inches x 9
inches and would weigh about 28 pounds.
14,000
bars at 28 pounds is 196 tons requiring a minimum of 78 two-and-a-half ton
trucks to transport.
The
bar seen being handed around like it was a loaf of bread looks a bit larger,
roughly 3 inches x 4 inches x 12 inches.
A
gold bar of this size weighs 75 pounds and 14,000 of these bars would weigh 523
tons requiring 209 trucks.
Oddball carries a Luger P-08 “Parabellum” semiautomatic gun,
which were in service only in Switzerland and Germany.
Approximately 20
minutes were cut from the movie by MGM and studio boss James T. Aubrey before
theatrical release.
MGM even changed the
title of the movie. Originally it was called The Warriors, then in post
production it was changed to Kelly’s Warriors and then into Kelly’s Heroes.
Clint Eastwood
mentioned in interviews that he was very disappointed about the way movie was
re-cut by studio because many deleted scenes not only gave depth to the
characters but also made the movie much better.
Some of the deleted
scenes were shown on promotional stills and described in interviews with cast
and crew for Cinema Retro’s special edition article about Kelly’s Heroes;
Oddball and his crew pack up to go over the lines to meet up with Kelly and
others while local village girls are running around half naked.
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