Telly Savalas

  • The Scalphunters (1968)

    The Scalphunters (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2021) The civil rights movement finally makes its way to the western genre in The Scalphunters, a film based on the relationship between a badly-educated white trapper and an escaped black slave as they confront Native Americans and scalp-hunters. Burt Lancaster once again stars in a film that pokes at his own image as a leading man — his character isn’t particularly smart, and he obviously starts out as a complete racist before learning better. Ossie Davis has a more likable role as a well-read runaway slave heading to Mexico but being treated as property by everyone he encounters, white or native. Telly Savalas (the only bald man in 1960s Hollywood!) rounds up the headliners as an antagonist to them both. The Scalphunters isn’t as preachy as many of its contemporaries, with enough humour and action to keep the lulls low. The sunny landscape is more serviceable than spectacular, but those were the 1960s — audiences knew what the west looked like, and focused more on what else the genre could do than show widescreen vistas. The Scalphunters, typically for a film directed by Sydney Pollack, was very much a film of its moments, using the western tropes to work out current events of the time.

  • Kelly’s Heroes (1970)

    Kelly’s Heroes (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2018) In-between MASH, Kelly’s Heroes and Catch-22, 1970 was a banner year for using other conflicts to talk about the Vietnam War. MASH transposed late-sixties war cynicism on the Korean front, while Catch-22 talked disaffection among WW2 bomber crews and Kelly’s Heroes has greedy American infantry soldiers teaming up with a hippie-led crew of tankers to go steal a few million dollars’ worth of Nazi gold. This certainly isn’t your fifties war movie—in between the self-interested soldiers, corrupt officers, friendly fire incidents and a long-haired tank leader memorably played by Donald Sutherland (who was also in MASH), it’s obvious that Kelly’s Heroes had far more on its mind than just a WW2 adventure. It’s clunky (legend has it that the filmmakers didn’t quite get what they were going for, largely because of studio interference) but it still works on a pure entertainment level largely because of the terrific cast. Sutherland aside, there’s Clint Eastwood in the heroic role, supported by Telly Savalas, Don Rickles and Harry Dean Stanton in a small role. The adventure gets going quickly and gets weirder and wilder the deeper in enemy territory it goes. The final resolution has the so-called good guys bribing Nazis to get what they want (with cues echoing Sergio Leone), which is interesting on its own. Kelly’s Heroes is more palatable now that it must have been at the time—we’ve grown used to anti-heroic portrayals of the military, and Vietnam-era attitudes toward war and war movies are now far more familiar. Still, the result is entertaining enough, and while many prefer more straight-ahead drama along the line of Where Eagles Dare, there’s no dismissing that Kelly’s Heroes can still be watched eagerly today.