Kelly’s Heroes is a 1970 World War II comedy drama heist film, directed by Brian G. Hutton, about a motley crew of American GIs who go AWOL in order to rob a French bank, located behind German lines, of its stored Nazi gold bars.

The film stars Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas, and co-stars Don Rickles, Carroll O’Connor, and Donald Sutherland providing the comic absurdity, with secondary, comedic roles by Harry Dean Stanton, Gavin MacLeod, Karl-Otto Alberty, and Stuart Margolin. The screenplay was written by British film and television writer Troy Kennedy Martin. The film was a US-Yugoslav co-production, filmed mainly in the Croatian village of Vižinada on the Istria peninsula.

During a thunderstorm in early September 1944, units of the 35th Infantry Division are nearing the French town of Nancy. One of the division’s mechanized reconnaissance platoons is ordered to hold their position when the Germans counterattack. The outnumbered platoon is also hit by friendly fire from their own mortars.

Private Kelly, a former lieutenant scapegoated for a failed infantry assault, captures Colonel Dankhopf of Wehrmacht Intelligence. Interrogating his prisoner, Kelly notices the officer’s briefcase has several gold bars disguised under lead plating. Curious, he gets the colonel drunk and learns that there is a cache of 14,000 gold bars, worth $16 million (about $280 million in 2023), stored in a bank vault 30 miles (50 km) behind German lines in the French town of Clermont. When their position is overrun and the Americans pull back, a Tiger I tank kills Dankhopf.

Kelly decides to steal the gold. He recruits Supply Sergeant “Crapgame” in order to obtain the supplies and the weapons needed. A spaced-out tank commander known as “Oddball” overhears the heist plan and suggests that his three unattached M4 Sherman tanks join the caper. With their commanding officer, Captain Maitland, preoccupied with visiting his uncle “The General” (and stealing a yacht), the members of Kelly’s platoon are all eager to join Kelly in the heist. After much argument, Kelly finally persuades cynical Master Sergeant “Big Joe” to go along.

Kelly decides that his infantrymen and Oddball’s tanks and crew will proceed separately and meet near Clermont. The Shermans fight their way through the German lines, destroying a railway depot in the process, but the bridge that they must cross is blown up by Allied fighter-bombers. Oddball contacts an engineering unit to build a bridge for the crossing, and the engineers in turn bring in even more men to supply support.

After losing their jeeps and half-tracks to friendly fire from an American fighter aircraft that mistakes them for German soldiers, Kelly and his men proceed on foot. They walk into a minefield, and Private Grace is blown up when he steps on a mine. Forced to engage a German patrol that arrives to investigate the explosion, the last two men still trapped in the minefield, PFC Mitchell and Corporal Job, are killed before Kelly’s team can eliminate the German soldiers.

Oddball links up with Kelly two nights later, bringing with him the extra troops that he has acquired, and they battle their way across the river to Clermont. By this time, intercepted radio messages attract the notice of Major General Colt, who misinterprets them as efforts by an aggressive Army unit pushing forward on their own initiative and immediately rushes to the new front to exploit this “breakthrough.”