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)

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As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of the review.

If one reads enough movie reviews and articles, eventually the expression “critic-proof” will emerge. Normally, this is used to describe big-budget, lunkheaded Hollywood blockbusters that are virtually guaranteed to be massive hits no matter how much the critics dump on them. However, I think the phrase could just as appropriately be applied to Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, which I recently saw for the first time as part of the Wexner Center’s exhibition Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms. Like many movies that are labeled “underground films,” Chelsea Girls stands outside the accepted rules of mainstream narrative cinema. The film, loosely structured as a series of vignettes featuring a number of Warhol Factory “superstars,” is a rebuke to traditional notions of “good” and “bad.”

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THE MOVIE: This scare picture is set at the country home of a horror novelist, played by Jonathan Frid, the Barnabas Collins of TV's Dark Shadows. The novelist is having a bunch of friends he despises come over for the weekend so they can all get drunk and recoil from each other in disgust, but this fun time is spoiled by the appearance of three malevolent figures who appear to have sprung from the darkest resources of his own fevered brain: Herve Villechaize as a bossy dwarf named Spider, British screen queen Martine Beswick in silky dominatrix gear (playing a character billed as "Queen of Evil"), and a giant hooded bodybuilder who brought along his enormous ax in case the generator breaks down and some firewood needs a-cuttin'. These worthies proceed to organize the weekend activities, which turn into a series of truth games and tests that result in the steady thinning out of the cast (which includes Mary Woronov, Richard Cox, Christina Pickles, and Troy Donahue). At the end, Frid makes the welcome disovery that this has all been a dream. Then the remaining members of the audience, which has also thinned out somewhat since the opening credits, finds out that, oh, no it wasn't.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: Seizure was the first feature directed by the then-twenty-eight-year-old Oliver Stone, from an original screenplay credited to Stone and Edward Mann, the writer-director of Hallucination Generation, Hot Pants Holiday, and Who Says I Can't Ride a Raindbow!, the only film I know of whose cast includes both Morgan Freeman and Skitch Henderson.

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Peter Sobczynski at Hollywood Bitchslap checks in with the towering Mary Woronov as the inimitable cult queen prepares to spend the weekend in Chicago, at retrospective screenings of a couple of her drive-in classics, Rock 'n' Roll High School (at the Music Box Theatre on May 9, with music critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot) and, on May 10, Death Race 2000, as part of the annual Sci Fi Spectacular. Woronov entered movies through the side door after working with "the Theatre of the Ridiculous in New York, which was majorly cult--it was hardly Broadway theater or even off-Broadway," and then with Andy Warhol, which led to her getting a show-stopping role in the breakout Warhol factory picture The Chelsea Girls. For much of her movie career, Woronov seemed joined at either hip to the late Paul Bartel, who directed her in Death Race 2000 and co-starred with her in Rock 'n' Roll High School, and Roger Corman, on whose nickel both pictures were made. (She also appeared in the Corman productions Hollywood Boulevard and Cannonball, a follow-up to Death Race 2000, which she describes as "just the worst movie" and which she says inspires this outburst from Bartel, who directed it: "What is happening to me? I don�t like cars--I hate cars!�") and acted for Bartel in such labors of love as Eating Raoul and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.) As she explains it now, it was a natural fit in both cases because Bartel "really liked camp acting and that was really who I was, a camp actress," and because Corman "didn't care as long as the movie got made."

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