Donald Sutherland as "Oddball"
My youngest son and I have been watching movies every other day the past week and a half.
The most recent movie, the fifth, was "Kelly's Heroes" a movie celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The movie is as funny as I remember it. The movie opens with Clint Eastwood (Kelly) capturing a German intelligence officer in a town with at least a battalion of German troops. Eastwood drives through the town and the all those German soldiers in a Jeep never gets a scratch. The officer tells Kelly about 14,000 gold bars 30 miles behind enemy lines.
Kelly, along with Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas and Don Rickles drive and walk that 30 miles, capture the town and get the gold. In a gunfight at the OK Corral sequence, they make a deal with a German tank commander guarding the bank and get away with all the gold.
I first saw it in the theater my senior year in high school. Five years later, after four years in the Air Force, in 1975, I was in Armor School at Fort Knox and served a decade on active duty and in the reserves as a tank commander. then in 1999, when I had been a bearded civilian for a decade and a half, I got my last tanker nickname. The company I worked for acquired a subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Several of a us flew there to meet the staff. We got picked up at the airport by a company driver who spoke fluent English he learned from movies.
On the slow trip to the office in Sao Paulo traffic, our CEO told the driver, "Neil used to be a tank commander." At a traffic light he turned around and said, "Oddball! You look just like Oddball. I love Kellys Heroes."
And that nickname stuck till I changed jobs.
The other movies so far:
Midway (2019)
Ford vs Ferrari
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Wild Bunch
