Kelly's Heroes is a 1970 World War II comedy-drama heist film, directed by Brian G. Hutton, about a motley crew of American GIs who go AWOL in order to rob a French bank, located behind German lines, of its stored Nazi gold bars. The film stars Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas, and co-stars Don Rickles, Carroll O'Connor, and Donald Sutherland providing the comic absurdity, with secondary, comedic roles by Harry Dean Stanton, Gavin MacLeod, Karl-Otto Alberty, and Stuart Margolin. The screenplay was written by British film and television writer Troy Kennedy Martin. The film was a US-Yugoslav co-production, filmed mainly in the Croatian village of Vižinada on the Istria peninsula. Plot During a thunderstorm in early September 1944, units of the 35th Infantry Division are nearing the French town of Nancy. One of the division's mechanized reconnaissance platoons is ordered to hold their position when the Germans counterattack. The outnumbered platoon is also hit by friendly fire from their own mortars. Private Kelly, a former lieutenant scapegoated for a failed infantry assault, captures Colonel Dankhopf of Wehrmacht Intelligence. Interrogating his prisoner, Kelly notices the officer's briefcase has several gold bars disguised under lead plating. Curious, he gets the colonel drunk and learns that there is a cache of 14,000 gold bars, worth US$16 million ($ million today), stored in a bank vault behind German lines in the French town of Clermont. When their position is overrun and the Americans pull back, a Tiger I tank kills Dankhopf. Kelly decides to steal the gold. He recruits Supply Sergeant "Crapgame" in order to obtain the supplies and weapons that will be needed. A spaced-out tank commander known as "Oddball" overhears the heist plan and suggests his three unattached M4 Sherman tanks join the caper. With their commanding officer, Captain Maitland, preoccupied with visiting his uncle "The General" (and stealing a yacht), Kelly's platoon are all eager to join Kelly in the heist. After much argument, Kelly finally persuades cynical Master Sergeant "Big Joe" to go along. Kelly decides that his infantrymen and Oddball's tanks and crew will proceed separately and meet near Clermont. The Shermans fight their way through the German lines, destroying a railway depot in the process, but the bridge they must cross is blown up by Allied fighter-bombers. Oddball contacts an engineering unit to build a bridge for the crossing, and the engineers in turn bring in even more