Kelly's Heroes / Where Eagles Dare

 (Action Double Feature) [Blu-ray]
Directed by Brian G. Hutton

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(27 customer reviews)

Product Description

KELLY'S HEROES/WHERE EAGLES DARE - Blu-Ray Movie

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4138 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2010-06-01
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .22 pounds
• Running time: 158 minutes

Features

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

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
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

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Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Two Grand Daddy's Of Their Genre's Hold Up Quite Well!!    Blu-Ray Review
By Rick L. Parrish
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 Don Rickles in his first 'close to persona' appearance post his Beach Party epics, are savvy acting vets and deliver the goods. Particularly the Nazi Tank Commander to whom they eventually spread their gold fever. One other appearance of note is an early Carroll O'Conner comic gem as a Give 'Em Hell General that displayed his flair before Archie Bunker immortalized him. All in all a very satisfying movie from an era that turned out too many psychedelic wrecks attempting to capture the times. These guys reflected it perfectly and did it in a WWII vehicle long before Hawkeye and Pierce...go figure!!!
Where Eagle's Dare is really a ride along for Clint Eastwood who had just achieved his superstar status prior to this one's release, so even tho it's always been billed since it's original run as a Clint Eastwood movie it's really Richard Burton's show all the way. It was his first and only attempt to forge himself into an Action/Adventure leading man and he succeeds admirably. Heaven (and Elizabeth) knows why he didn't do more! The plot while seeming a simple straight forward WWII rescue mission turns mind-twister in the final third and the movie features really spectacular stunt sequences. There's action, suspense, and skullduggery aplenty for fans of this type of film and as I said before a surprisingly effective action star performance from Richard Burton coupled with an almost as silent as his 'man with no name' cowboy turn, as the token American on a British mission, from Eastwood. Great fun and since it's a period piece - it holds up well.
Highly Recommended

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
great war films
By gellerfan
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 playing them, one in my sony BDP350 and the other my upconverting Toshiba HD-DVD players. There was no contest, the blu-ray was remarkably detailed, and colors excellent, the 2:35 widescreen a must for viewing the entire film as it should be seen. (mind you, I love my HD-DVD and always felt that it was a better standard for high def than Blu -ray, but alas Toshiba lost that battle........sigh)
You simply can't go wrong with this combo set!

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
WED is too dark by default, loses lots of detail
By R. Noble
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.)
UPDATE 6/18/10: A commenter suggested I try altering my LCD video settings. These settings work well for every other disc I own, plus OTA broadcast and streaming Netflix over Roku, but what the heck, I tried it. I had to choose a setting with very, very high contrast and backlight levels, but it made a real difference. The movie looked a lot better and the details became much more clear. Was the result better than the DVD version (viewed with my regular LCD settings)? To my eye, maybe it's a 5% or 10% improvement. I wonder how or why the default settings are so dim on this BR disc? Another reviewer (on blu-ray.com) had the same experience I did. But I think if you really like the movie, it's probably worth getting the BR disc and turning up the brightness and contrast when you watch it.