Couple more pictures of deleted scenes.
Just like one of the ones for which i already posted links in my previous post this picture shows deleted scene in which Kelly is talking or arguing with another soldier while they are all in the barn before Oddball arrives;
http://images3.cinema.de/imedia/5499/1905499,+kBazuQ+2SjD3wAWZa6DRMkAW MTzT_DCuAuXNP8CY1jF2+vAiKmm1+RPUSOylW3ydI7b1YEndyg5VqBRvk4Q8g==.jpg
This one shows Butowski holding his sniper rifle and pointing it at other soldiers. This is probably from already mentioned deleted scene where he gest into the argument with Kelly. I personally always thought that this character looks like someone who has mental problems, but in the movie this is barely even hinted;
http://images3.cinema.de/imedia/5515/1905515,wENhz_thfdJhBgdiWFGDOVnVF wIK9XY2EIm6+lzuEKxw+7oNmxMioOI6kztYzm9gPGnkVBCfYYeZ3H8jcyq0DA==.jpg
If anyone happens to find still that shows deleted scene where Oddball and his guys are riding on tanks while half naked village girls are running around them, post a link for it.
Also, here's some info about deleted scenes. You can read it for yourself here;
http://www.clinteastwood.org/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=17208a57971e1d e0995b4d5f987f72c1&topic=3284.msg48301#msg48301
"The post-movie commentary on TCM and stuff I've read elsewhere suggests that some scenes were cut, some of which lent more anti-war sentiment to it. Apparently Eastwood was quite upset with these cuts. I can't find much info on this, outside of some search results on this message board that suggest that there had been a scene at the end which suggested that they had been caught (ever since I first saw the movie I DID wonder just how they smuggled it away)."
"The commentary on TCM was correct--the script for Kelly's Heroes did have more of an antiwar slant. The finished film barely resembles the script that Clint read and enjoyed. Clint told interviewer Michael Henry for the French magazine Positif:"
It was a very fine anti-militaristic script, one that said some important things about the war, about this propensity that man has to destroy himself. In the editing, the scenes that put the debate in philosophical terms were cut and they kept adding action scenes. When it was finished, the picture had lost its soul. If action and reflection had been better balanced, it would have reached a much broader audience. I don't know if the studio exercised pressure on the director or if it was the director who lost his vision along the way, but I know that the picture would have been far superior if there hadn't been this attempt to satisfy action fans at any cost. And it would have been just as spectacular and attractive. It's not an accident that some action movies work and others don't. What makes the difference is the quality of the writing.
"(Positif, no. 287 (January 1985): 48-57; republished in Clint Eastwood: Interviews, p. 109-110; translated from the French by KC.)"
"Richard Schickel discusses the problems with filming Kelly's Heroes and Clint's displeasure with the finished film in great detail in his book Clint Eastwood, a Biography (p. 232-237). Here are some excerpts:"
Financed by MGM, and featuring an all-star cast, it was a self-contradictory enterprise. A military adventure, to be made on something close to an epic scale, it was also supposed to be an antiwar satire, somewhat along the lines of such contemporary films as Castle Keep, M*A*S*H, Catch-22 and Too Late the Hero, all of which, one way or another, spoke to public disgust with the war in Vietnam.
It was this aspect of the project that stirred Clint. Around this time he confessed that he had voted for Nixon in 1968 because he regarded Johnson's bombing halt as a cynical electoral ploy of Hubert Humphrey. But he still had no enthusiasm for the Vietnam adventure or for militarism in general, and Troy Kennedy Martin's original script expressed these feelings--in Clint's opinion, movingly and adroitly. ...
Running more than two hours, Kelly's Heroes is a messily contradictory and never fully resolved movie. Besides being, occasionally, an antiwar satire, it is also from time to time a caper (or bunch of guys-rob-a-vault) comedy, an old-fashioned service (or bunch-of-goldbricks-goof-off) comedy and, yes, a straight bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission piece. To put the point simply, it tried to be all things to all audiences and so, naturally, ended up a muddle-although, right up to the end, Clint thought it could be straightened out.
At Clint's behest, Don Siegel was offered the picture, but he was tied up on the postproduction with Sister Sara, and so, with Clint's approval, the assignment went to the pyrotechnically inclined Brian Hutton. He, not unnaturally, wanted to stress the kind of action that had worked for him in Where Eagles Dare which went into its successful release just before this film went on location.
"Postproduction of Kelly's Heroes was a bigger mess than the filming, which had dragged on for nine months on location in Mexico and Yugoslavia. MGM had just installed a new head of production, James Aubrey, who hadn't originally approved the film and wasn't interested in epic-sized pictures, prefering small budget films that could still yield profits for the studio. After viewing Hutton's cut, Aubrey insisted the film should be a "Clint Eastwood action-adventure" and ordered substantial revisions that wound up changing the whole tone of the film. He even changed the title from The Warriors to Kelly's Heroes."
Hutton, who did not have final cut, had no choice but to oblige Aubrey, and when Clint saw what had been done to the film, he told the director, "Brian, you can't release this." To which the director, who had been fighting the good fight, replied wearily, "Well, that's the way they want to do it," adding that the studio had a release date "creeping up on them." The implication was that even if the studio liked Clint's ideas there wouldn't be time to execute them.
In general Clint felt that the film's comedy now played too broadly, and specifically he was dismayed at the excision of a transition scene between the picture's second and third acts in which, as he recalls, he and the character played by Telly Savalas "just sort of summed up the philosophy of those loose ends, and what the war had done to them." He goes so far as to say that "its soul was taken out, a little bit of its soul was robbed
"Schickel goes on to describe how Clint tried in vain to convince Aubrey that he could fix the film himself if given just one day in the editing room, but Aubrey wasn't interested.
Clint's displeasure with Kelly's Heroes was so great, especially coming on the heels of his disappointment with Paint Your Wagon, that from this point on Clint would take much more control of his projects, producing most of the remainder of his films, and within a few years he would be directing almost all of them as well."
"I was over at another forum where I came across a thread where they said Clint Eastwood made a cut of Kelly Heroes but the studio refused to release it."
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skat1140
8 years ago
Your comments and quotations add alot of depth to the discussion. Many thanks for that.
To the people (including Clint Eastwood!) who think this film was gutted by [MGM Studio Head] Aubrey and/or that many more deleted scenes should have been retained: you guys are more nuts than Oddball! This film is already almost 2-1/2 hours! That's an eternity. I'm amazed just how tight this movie is, how the story flows, with such a long screen time. It's a credit to the screenwriter and the editor and (yes) the cuts Aubrey insisted on and got. What, Eastwood is disappointed that more dialog isn't present to flesh out the character's motivations? Too bad. Less is more. Less is much, much more.
The scene that was left out explaining how the tanks were lost on the bridge? That was a great cut. That type of jumpiness is great! It conveys the hecticness of war. When Luke enters the Cantina in Star Wars, they don't give a back-story on all the various aliens.
I don't think I've ever seen a Directors Cut that made the movie a better product. In "The Good The Bad The Ugly", sure it fills in blanks, but they're blanks that add to the movie (less is more). Filling in the blanks is fun for trivia/curiosity purposes, but the movie is not better, just longer. In "Aliens", adding those scenes destroys a major part of the movies's mystery-- the Director's Cut of Aliens is a much less suspenseful movie because of it.
So, yeah, these scenes would've been great on a DVD, to watch after the movie. But to reconstitute them, or to have included them in the first place, is a major mistake.
As a sidenote: why is it so hard to make a good action movie nowadays? Most current action movies are terrible. At about 30-45 minutes in, you start looking at the watch as the movie starts to sag. You sigh because you know 60-90 minutes of explosions, car chases, and CGI are left to be observed. Yet, Kelly's Heroes never sags. There's something about the actors, the plot, the pacing of Kelly's Heroes. It's 2-1/2 hours and it goes by like a 90 minute film. And if someone asks you the plot of Kelly's Heroes, or asks you to give a synopsis, you probably can. You'll never be able to do that with "Fast and Furious 5" or the most recent James Bond film.
Perhaps the unity of the work has something to do with there being only 1 screenwriter? Most action films today always have 3 or 4 or more (known) contributors. They're always a mess that caters to interest groups and demographics and seem to be written by computer algorithm.
Anyway, for all the people advocating a Director's Cut. Be careful what you wish for.
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