Today, acting legend Clint Eastwood stars alongside Telly Savalas in the World War 2 action adventure flick Kelly’s Heroes, which airs from 3.55pm on ITV4. The 1970 film follows a German officer, who while carrying some gold bars falls into the hands of a corrupt US platoon. Kelly, played by Eastwood, and his sergeant Big Joe enlist a team to attempt to find the remaining gold from a bank behind enemy lines. Kelly’s Heroes remains a firm favourite with viewers, and was voted in at number 34 on Channel 4’s 100 Great War Films of All Time. It also boasts an impressive 78 percent positive rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.
He added: “To acknowledge its deaths the film has no resources above the conventional antagonistic ironies and comradely pieties of most war movies. And since its subject is not war, but burglary masquerading as war, the easy acceptance of the masquerade—which is apparently quite beyond the film’s control—becomes a denial of moral perception that depresses the mind and bewilders the imagination”.
By the early Seventies, Eastwood was already a huge Hollywood star, having become a household name as a result of his spell as The Man with No Name in the spaghetti western trilogy, which included the films A Fistful of Dollars, A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
But the same year that Kelly’s Heroes was released represented a huge personal challenge for Eastwood, who saw his father suffer a fatal heart attack at the age of just 64.
Fritz Manes, a long-term collaborator with Eastwood and film producer, described the star’s father’s death as “the only bad thing that ever happened to him in his life”, in Patrick McGilligan’s 2015 book Clint: The Life and Legend.
The news of his father’s death had a “profound impact” on Eastwood’s life, and as a result he made a vow to become “more productive, working with greater speed and efficiency on set, and adopted an even more rigorous health regimen”.
Eastwood recalled his father’s death, Outsider magazine reported last year, discussing how it him him “like a ton of bricks” but saw the legend focus even more on his own health, become stricter with what he ate and how he lived.
The now 92-year-old said: “Stay away from carbohydrates, especially rich desserts. Keep a scale in your bathroom. Get proper rest. Try to be optimistic. Eat fruits and raw vegetables. Take vitamins. Skip beverages loaded with sugars. Avoid alcohol in excess.”
