Kelly's Heroes / Where Eagles Dare (Action Double Feature) [Blu-ray]


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Rating: 4.1

List Price : $14.98 Price : $8.39
Kelly's Heroes / Where Eagles Dare (Action Double Feature) [Blu-ray]

Product Description

Kelly's Heroes

They were goldbricks until they found out about the gold bricks – a fortune in Nazi-confiscated bullion! Clint Eastwood reups with the director of his Where Eagles Dare for the action-filled and tongue-in-cheek tale of GIs who decide to get something extra out of the war. Eastwood’s title character masterminds a scheme to slip behind enemy lines and steal the loot. Co-stars include a trio on the verge of big-time TV success: Carroll O’Connor, Telly Savalas and Gavin MacLeod. Plus, Don Rickles plays the expectedly outspoken Crapgame. And in the same year as his starmaking M*A*S*H, Donald Sutherland is Oddball, World War II’s only hippie. Dig it!


Where Eagles Dare

The mission is clear. Get in. Get the general. Get out. Commandos charged with freeing a U.S. general from an Alpine fortress should also be told to trust nothing – including the search-and-rescue orders just issued. Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood go Where Eagles Dare in this twisty World War II thriller written by action master Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra) and directed by Brian G. Hutton (Kelly’s Heroes). Known for fiery dramatic roles, Burton ventures into the realm of movie pyrotechnics with dynamic efficiency. And Eastwood’s cool-fire presence heightens one searing action sequence after another. The film became Eastwood’s then-largest hit and its studio’s #1 moneymaker of the year.

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Kelly's Heroes, a tongue-in-cheek 1970 variation on The Dirty Dozen looks less fresh than it did in the year of its release, but it still has some enjoyable moments. Clint Eastwood stars along with Donald Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Carroll O'Connor, and Gavin MacLeod in the story of American soldiers who try to steal gold behind enemy lines in World War II. Sutherland's hippie G.I. doesn't have the sardonic and timely appeal he did during the Vietnam War, but the film's irreverence and several of the performances are worth a visit. --Tom Keogh

Scorned by reviewers when it came out, Where Eagles Dare is a concentrated dose of commando death-dealing to legions of Nazi machine-gun fodder that has acquired a cult over the years. In 1968 Clint Eastwood was just getting used to the notion that he might be a world-class movie star; Richard Burton, whose image had been shaped equally by classical theater training and his headline-making romance with Elizabeth Taylor, was eager to try on the action ethos Eastwood was already nudging toward caricature. Alistair MacLean's novel The Guns of Navarone had inspired the film that started the '60s vogue for World War II military capers, so he was prevailed on to write the screenplay (his first). The central location, an impregnable Alpine stronghold locked in ice and snow, is surpassing cool, but the plot and action are ultra-mechanical, and the switcheroo gamesmanship of just who is the undercover double (triple?) agent on the mission becomes aggressively silly. --Richard T. Jameson


  • KELLY'S HEROES/WHERE EAGLES DARE BLU-RAY (BLU-RAY DISC)




Kelly's Heroes / Where Eagles Dare (Action Double Feature) [Blu-ray] Reviews


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29 Reviews
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Two Grand Daddy's Of Their Genre's Hold Up Quite Well!! Blu-Ray Review, July 6, 2010
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This review is from: Kelly's Heroes / Where Eagles Dare (Action Double Feature) [Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)
First the real question. The transfers are pristine and look great. The sound is much better on both this go round. Worth the upgrade? Yes, definitely.

The movies themselves are really trend setters for their time and tho Kelly's Heroes is the more dated of the two (ironically mainly because of the studio's attempt to update it to a sixtie's teen audience despite it's WWII movie status)...it's still worth a soda and a box of popcorn (and that'll pay for them right there!) to hear Donald Sutherland say "Stop making with the negative waves...Man"...as he manages to slip some sixties love generation comic relief into the proceedings (his appearance as the visiting General thorn in Robert Ryan's side in The Dirty Dozen is almost as hilarious and helped Sutherland rock the 60's at the movie theater leading up to the seminal MASH in 1970). Heroes is a solid heist caper set in the middle of Wartime which makes it oddball enough -even for then. The motley crew featuring... Read more
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars great war films, July 1, 2010
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gellerfan "gell3334" (FLUSHING, NEW YORK United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kelly's Heroes / Where Eagles Dare (Action Double Feature) [Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)
The seventies saw a spate of enjoyable war themed movies being released, from The Dirty Dozen to Eye Of The Needle. WED and Kelly's Heroes were among the best of the bunch, lighter and more energetic than today's dark tales such as Valkyrie, Saving Pvt. Ryan etc, good though they may be.

Anyone who is going to purchase this is already familiar with the plotlines, so I won't delve into a synopsis- see IMDB or Amazon for that.

Allies vs. Nazis has always made for good theater, and Eastwood as an action hero is tops, with stellar casts including Richard Burton in WED and Telly Savalas and Don Rickles in KH.
The price point for the Blu-ray discs as a combo is great and the transfers are superb, though not restored and remastered, as some reviewers have lamented.

Still, the clarity of the picture and the vibrancy of the colors is, in my opinion, superior to the previous DVD releases. I compared WED on standard DVD and Blu-ray by simultaneously... Read more
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars WED is too dark by default, loses lots of detail, June 11, 2010
By 
R. Noble (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kelly's Heroes / Where Eagles Dare (Action Double Feature) [Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)
I bought this Blu-ray for Where Eagles Dare, and had hopes for an improvement over the DVD version, which was already pretty good. Sadly, during the transfer the brightness was turned down so low that much of the image is now lost in the shadows. For example, many scenes are now so dark that you can't see the actor's faces. In other cases, big items (like airplanes) are lost in the darkness of the mountain backgrounds. This was not a problem on the DVD version. It's especially regrettable since in the brighter scenes, the blu-ray does offer a sharp image. I can only wonder if the person doing the transfer actually looked at the results. (Note that another reviewer feels the brighter DVD image was a problem, and the darker blu-ray is more faithful to the original version shown in theaters 42 years ago. I saw it back then, but make no claims to remember the brigtness level in the theater on that day so long ago. Maybe others have a better ability to remember such things.)... Read more
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