Fall Flicks: Fury

It was a guy's night out for Brad Pitt's latest, the World War II set, tank riding action-drama, Fury.  Written and Directed by future Dammaged Goods Hall of Famer David Ayer, Fury opens up deep within Nazi Germany in 1945 where a desperate Hitler has every man, woman and child fighting for their dying cause.  We meet the crew of Fury, a Sherman tank that has treaded a bloody path through Africa into Europe.  Leading the outfit is Wardaddy (Pitt), a hard ass who whips his men and kills the bad guys but suffers in solitude.  Behind him is Bible (Shia LaBeouf), bespectacled, respectable, little brother type to Wardaddy who always seems to be on the verge of tears.  Loading the cannon and fixing Fury is the scary and brutish Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal) while been there, done that know it all Gordo (Michael Pena) drives the big rig.  When their gunner is killed in a skirmish, meek administrative typist Norman (Logan Lerman) is assigned to the crew and learns the ways and horrors of war from the experienced team and first hand.

To start, I found Fury to be terrific.  If you read this online journal regularly you know that World War II movies are among my favorites.  So one with a big budget and a talented cast and crew behind it is right up my alley.  Fury is brutal, it's intense and it's funny.  If you're familiar with any of Ayer's previous work like Harsh Times, Street Kings, End of Watch or Sabotage, you know to expect a gritty, reality based tale of (mostly) men working in violent professions and the bond between them.  While that hard edged machismo can come off near ridiculous in modern affairs, it suits Fury perfectly as Ayer doesn't glorify violence as much as show you the consequences, physically and mentally, in a time when the enemy was clear cut and soldiers were asked to execute and endure harsh realities.  Wardaddy pushes his men to stay on their toes and do their jobs, which is to kill Nazi's.  Especially crime against humanity extremist members of the Schutzstaffel or SS.  They get it first and they get it bad.

Story wise, Fury doesn't explore anything we haven't seen in World War II movies before.  War is hell, our troops were spread too thin, under trained and the finale is a few versus many.  What makes it resonate into it's own memorable feature is the camaraderie between the crew members, the depiction of brutality of what these men had to do in order to survive and ultimately win the war.  Brad Pitt is solid as Wardaddy, in a sense he's like the father of his men, riding them so they'll rise to the challenge and not get themselves or others killed.  He's also surprisingly still yoked for 50 years old as a lingering shirtless scene shows Pitt's still got it and must have his Troy workout routine written down somewhere.  LaBeouf is like the sensitive little brother and doesn't have the same kind of necessary mean streak as his comrades.  Jon Bernthal is straight up terrifying as the savage of the group and I wondered if he was going to end up squaring off with Wardaddy or turning on the team.  Ayer alum Michael Pena gets a lot of laughs as the wise ass while Lerman injects his role as the greenhorn who must adapt or die with believable nervous, boyish humanity.

All of Ayer's work focuses on the daily lives of characters who live and work in dangerous worlds.  End of Watch and Sabotage neared docudrama levels as it felt like the audience was basically along for the ride.  Fury, with it's period setting, shares the same closeness but doesn't come off quite so mechanical as just tagging along.  The action is violent with faces and limbs being blown off and people being burned alive.  There's a great fight between the Sherman and the German's faster, better armored Tiger that must be among the best depictions of close quarter tank battle ever put on the big screen.  There's a mention of tracer rounds so you can see what you're shooting at but it seemed like every shot fired in the film was traced in a green or red line, giving it a strange, laser beam like feel.

While some might find the film nihilistic, I found it to be inspiring and a reminder to the great men and women who gave up their daily lives and were transported halfway around the world to fight, suffer and die for the greater good.  Ayer continues to be one of my favorite directors working today with his unrelenting, raw and realistic approach to familiar genres where punches aren't pulled and an R rating is guaranteed.

My First Million: Clint Eastwood and Kelly's Heroes

By the late 60's and early 70's, Clint Eastwood was becoming one of Hollywood's biggest stars.  Thanks to the world wide success of Sergio Leone's Man With No Name Trilogy (where he actually has a name, in each...), Eastwood was paid hefty sums in the $500,000 - $750,000 range for World War II action fest Where Eagles Dare and the awesomely excessive western musical Paint Your Wagon, co-starring fellow cinema badass Lee Marvin.  But his first million dollar paycheck came for, I believe, 1970's Kelly's Heroes.  Re-teaming with Eagles director Brian G. Hutton, Eastwood would receive top billing this time around, heading up a talented cast that included Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Carroll O'Connor and Donald Sutherland.  What initiallyally started out as a Comedic Adventure Caper, Heroes would suffer a tumultuous shoot that was originally slated for 9 weeks but went on for 6 months in Yugoslavia.

The script, originally titled, The Warriors, by Troy Kennedy Martin, sold to MGM for a cool $250,000 clams.  The story of a group of G.I.'s in France who go behind enemy lines to steal $16 million of Nazi gold, The Warriors had all the potential trappings of a great anti-war adventure film.  Director Hutton saw it as a comedy while Eastwood saw it as a satirical adventure caper.  At first thinking they could shoot it in northern California, production moved to Yugoslavia where original World War II weapons and vehicles were still abundant.  Throw in the offer to demolish a small town and the newly retitled Kelly's Heroes was off and running.  To kick things off, Donald Sutherland was struck down with a case of Spinal Meningitis and spent 5 weeks in an English hospital.  The tone of the script was tricky to pinpoint as Eastwood saw it as a reflection of his own military service where he spent most of his time as a swimming instructor and his views on the Vietnam conflict.

Kelly's Heroes is one of my all time favorite Clint Eastwood flicks.  It's big, funny, weird and fun.  There's everything World War II movie aficionados love: Thompson sub-machine guns, tanks, minefields, a motley crew of smart ass G.I.'s, dog impressions, negative waves, Lalo Schfrin score, celebrating villagers, Tiger Tanks, snipers, wine and cheese. Eastwood is in typical serious form as the fed up soldier who sees his shot and takes it.  Sutherland gets the award for Best Hippie in World War 2 while O'Connor is hilariously blowhard as the general listening to the caper on the radio, thinking it's actually some motivated campaign to break enemy lines.  It's a men on a mission flick that isn't as long, serious or slow burning as The Guns of Navarone or The Dirty Dozen (which are both great, just different).  It would be interesting to see what the original version would have been like as Hutton and Eastwood fought and lost to the studio's recutting of the picture to remove most of the anti-war satire.  Eastwood would later comment on the film having the potential to be great but in the end was just a bunch of screw offs running around.  Kelly's Heroes had the unfortunate distinction of being prepared, produced and released under 3 different studio regimes at MGM.  In a bid to fight off the growing threat of television, Heroes was released in the over sized 70mm format.  The film took in $5.2 million, less than Where Eagles Dare but a decent hit nonetheless.

Eastwood was only 2 films away from another career defining film, the anti-establishment cop thriller, Dirty Harry.  Director Brian G. Hutton's output would slow tremendously before eventually retiring.  Donald Sutherland had just come off the smash hit MASH and still had  Klute, Animal House and Ordinary People in his near future.  Kelly's Heroes would be one of Carol O'Connor's last film credits before finding huge success on television in All in the Family, Archie Bunker's Place and In the Heat of the Night.  Telly Savalas had already established himself as a great character actor in roles ranging from the psycho soldier in The Dirty Dozen and as a Bond villain in On Her Majesty's Secret Service before becoming TV's Kojak.

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