Kelly's Heroes - Production

Production

The film was going to have a female role, but prior to filming, it was cut from the script. Ingrid Pitt, who was cast in the role revealed that she was "virtually climbing on board the plane bound for Yugoslavia when word came through that my part had been cut." The filming commenced in July 1969 and was completed in December and was shot on location in the Istrian village of Vižinada in the former Yugoslavia and London. Yugoslavia was chosen mostly because earnings from previous showings of movies there could not be taken out of the country, but could be used to fund the production. Also the Yugoslav army had in its inventory U.S. Sherman tanks (part of the military aid packages received when Marshal Tito split ways with Joseph Stalin and the U.S. feared a Red Army intervention through Hungary).

Several years after the film was released, Eastwood claimed that MGM had made additional cuts to Hutton's final version of the film, eliminating scenes that gave depth to the main characters. The resulting edits, Eastwood said, made the characters look like "a bunch of goof-offs from World War Two." Kelly's Heroes was the last non-Malpaso film that Eastwood agreed to appear in until In the Line of Fire, with the exception of Bronco Billy (1980), which was made by a company set up by Eastwood's close friend Robert Daley specifically for that production, due to Eastwood's divorce at the time.

There is a nod to Eastwood's spaghetti westerns in the standoff with the Tiger tank — a tongue-in-cheek remake of the ending of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, right down to a very similar musical score.

This film was produced and released during the Vietnam War, and in the same political and cultural climate as M*A*S*H — the war-weary soldiers who "don't even know what this war's all about" (Big Joe's words to the German tank commander), the Liberation of Europe being the least of their problems as they set out to line their own pockets.

The U.S. troops wear the insignia of the US 35th Infantry Division. The division actually was in action around Nancy in France in September 1944. The film also uses authentic M4 Sherman tanks (from Yugoslav Army's reserves), while most other contemporary war films, for example Patton, employed too-modern M48 tanks. Because the Yugoslav Army was at the time armed with US arms and locally developed German World War II equipment, the German and American vehicles, machine guns, radios and entrenching tools are remarkably accurate. There is, however, one anachronism. Private Gutowski, the unit's sniper, should be armed with a US Model 1903A4 Springfield sniper rifle with an Unertl target scope. He instead has a Soviet-made Model 91/30 Mosin Nagant sniper rifle with a bent bolt and a PU 3.5X-power side-mounted scope, with a US GI bayonet tied into place on the muzzle. The three Tiger I Tanks used in the film were actually ex-Soviet Army T-34 tanks, converted in great detail by specialists of the Yugoslav army for the 1969 movie The Battle of Neretva.

The movie inspired the 1975 movie Inside Out, about ex-American World War II veterans who team up with ex-Nazi war criminals to con a former Nazi party leader into revealing the location of a secret shipment of gold.

Although he does not appear in the credits, future director John Landis worked as a production assistant. He also appeared in the movie, dressed as a nun. During the shooting of the picture in Yugoslavia, he wrote the first draft of what would eventually become An American Werewolf in London.