Trailer
Plot summary
In 1944 France, Private Kelly takes Colonel Dankhopf of German intelligence prisoner and finds gold bars on him. After plying the colonel with drink, Kelly learns the bars come from a cache of 14,000 worth some $16 million, held in a bank in the town of Clermont, thirty miles behind German lines. Kelly wants the gold for himself. Master Sergeant Big Joe refuses to risk his men and warns him off, so Kelly turns to Supply Sergeant Crapgame for weapons and supplies. Oddball, a tank commander, overhears the plan and offers his three Sherman tanks. When Kelly puts the idea to Big Joe's platoon, the soldiers, worn down by pointless battles and bombing by their own side, join him, and Big Joe agrees.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Kelly's Heroes (1970)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Troy Kennedy Martin's screenplay drew on a true story listed as "The Greatest Robbery on Record" in Guinness World Records from 1956 to 2000: the 1945 theft of the German National Gold Reserves in Bavaria by U.S. military personnel and German civilians. Guinness editor Norris D. McWhirter told MGM he had very little information and suspected a cover-up.
- British researcher Ian Sayer began a nine-year investigation into the Guinness entry in 1975 and published the results in the 1984 book Nazi Gold. The inquiry led to two of the missing gold bars, valued in 2019 at over $1 million, being handed to the U.S. government at a secret ceremony in Bonn on 27 September 1996.
- The Tiger I tanks on screen were not Tigers at all: they were Soviet T-34s that the Yugoslav military had modified to look like the German tanks.
- During filming, Donald Sutherland contracted spinal meningitis, made worse by a lack of antibiotics, which sent him into a life-threatening coma before he managed to recover.
- During pre-production George Kennedy turned down the role of Big Joe, despite an offered fee of $300,000, about $2.6 million in 2025, simply because he did not like the role.
- MGM cut about 20 minutes from the film before its theatrical release, and Eastwood later said in interviews that he was very disappointed, feeling many of the deleted scenes gave depth to the characters and made the movie much better.
