KELLY’S HEROES (1970)



Like Three Kings (which it no doubt inspired), Kelly’s Heroes drops a heist flick into the middle of a war movie and winds up making some interesting points about free will versus obedience in a military setting where the grunts on the ground sometimes have more in common with the low-level enemy soldiers they’re fighting than they do with their high-ranking, high-living superiors. “You and us, we’re just soldiers, right?” Telly Savalas’ Master Sergeant “Big Joe” says to a German tank commander at one point. “We don’t even know what this war’s all about. All we do is we fight and we die and for what? We don’t get anything out of it.” True, the sentiment’s a little sketchy when the conflict in question is “The Good War” and the enemy solider in question is wearing Nazi S.S. stripes...but in the midst of the far less good Vietnam War, director Brian G. Hutton’s celebration of enlightened self-interest reached out to peaceniks and free market capitalists alike, courting both groups with a truly bizarre combination of actors including Savalas, Clint Eastwood, Caroll O’Connor, Donald Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton and Don Rickles. Sure, the movie’s pretty good...but I’m guessing it’s nowhere near as entertaining as the wrap party must have been. (AO)

USED CARS (1980)



This rowdy, ingenious comedy with the iconic title is like the history of con game farce impacted into a single, shiny object. It's about a war that breaks out between two rival car lots run by a pair of brothers (both played by Jack Warden), and it consists of one bold act of one-upmanship after another, with most of the schemes tinged with personal maliciousness. The nicer of the two Jack Wardens checks out early after his meaner number hires a stunt driver to take him on a test ride so scary that it induces a fatal coronary in the old duffer; his second-in-command, Kurt Russell, takes charge and prevents his nemesis from inheriting the lot by installing the boss' corpse behind the wheel of an old jalopy and burying it on the property. The movie's high point of brash invention comes when Russell and his team hire a couple of underground mechanical wizards (Michael McKean and David L. Lander, then joined at the hip as TV's Lenny and Squiggy) to jack into a televised presidential address so that they can cut into it with a live commercial, filmed on their rival's lot. (PN)

EATING RAOUL (1982)



Cult director Paul Bartel had his biggest indie hit with this homemade black comedy, in which he and the Amazonian Mary Woronov play an uptight, asexual married couple -- Paul and Mary Bland -- who accidentally murder a "swinger" (Garry Goodrow) who has invaded their home and tried to put the greasy moves on Mary. After cleaning out his pockets and coming to the conclusion -- which the movie seems to support -- that these polyester-clad degenerates will never be missed, the Blands adapt their discovery to an assembly line, putting ads in "swinger" papers to attract perverts who Paul dispatches with a konk to the head from his skillet. It adds something to the charm of the whole enterprise that the movie itself was a get-rich-quick scheme, which Bartel filmed in spurts over the course of several months, gathering cast and crew whenever he had enough money to proceed. Funding for the planned sequel, Bland Ambition, fell through, but the movie did inspire a comic book adaptation by underground legend Kim Deitch, as well as a later stage adaptation. Bartel and Woronov also revived their characters in a cameo for the 1986 horror movie Chopping Mall, for no clear reason except that they must have been in the area and the director offered them pie. (PN)

NIGHT SHIFT (1982)



This early Ron Howard film benefits immeasurably from Michael Keaton's performance, in his feature film debut, as a morgue attendant who persuades his rabbity supervisor (Henry Winkler) to turn the premises into the center of operations for a prostitution ring. This idea has detectable flaws, but they don't seem to matter much because of the enthusiasm with which Keaton embraces his brilliant concept and allows -- no, encourages -- it to take over and remake his life. His white boy with a taste for the pimp style now actually looks kind of prescient. And the fact that actual pimps made no serious attempt to adopt his euphemism for the profession, "love broker", make one weep for the lack of imagination of the human race. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent