The Clint Eastwood movie ruined by studio politics: “They’re going to hate this goddamn film”
Actors don’t have much say in what happens to a movie once the cameras have stopped rolling and it enters post-production, but Clint Eastwood still tried to state a case for trying to save a film he believed was being ruined by too many grubby fingerprints at studio level.
At the time, he still hadn’t made his directorial debut and hadn’t diversified his input by producing any of his pictures either, meaning there was nothing he could do about it. After all, he was only an actor for hire who was paid to perform their part and leave it at that, not that it prevented him from trying anyway.
He was a big enough star that filmmakers would listen to his suggestions and take some of them on board in the hopes of improving the end product, but Eastwood’s influence didn’t stretch as far as the boardroom, who continually ignored his pleas to maintain the spirit of the story that convinced him to sign on for 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes in the first place.
Director Brian G Wilson’s ensemble war dramedy turned a profit at the box office and earned strong reviews, so it’s not as if the movie was butchered. Still, the leading man wanted more from what emerged on the silver screen as a fairly by-the-numbers tale of a ragtag group of soldiers going AWOL to head behind enemy lines during World War II and heist Nazi gold from a French bank.
“This thing had been completely dehumanised,” he ranted to Paul Nelson. “It’d just become a massive action thing in which the special effects were great and there was a lot of action. But there was too much action. There needed to be some reason for this whole caper being there.”
When he asked then-MGM boss Jim Aubrey if a deleted scene could be put back into Kelly’s Heroes, he was told no because a premiere screening had already been arranged. When he asked if the first showing could be delayed so he could work on the edit to make it better, he was also told no, leaving Eastwood increasingly frustrated.
“Forget the critics,” he told Aubrey. “They’re going to hate this goddamn film anyway. Let’s put the movie back in its proper order so at least it has a fair chance, so that the critics might see something, or anybody might see something. The audiences, mainly.” Once more, his request was denied.
To make matters worse, MGM was in a constant state of transition. Eastwood explained that Bob O’Brien was the president when he first became attached to Kelly’s Heroes, who was then replaced by Louis F Polk, who was himself usurped by Aubrey, “So it started under one regime and was released two regimes later.”
From his perspective, MGM “needed the dough real fast,” and the best way to do that was to rush the movie into cinemas and ignore his constant petitions to try and improve the film. It wasn’t a disaster by any stretch, but it might well have been vastly superior had Eastwood gotten his way.
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