Kelly's Heroes, 1970. directed by Brian G. Hutton.
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Donald Sutherland (Oddball) became seriously ill during filming on-location in Yugoslavia. His wife received a telegram telling her to come immediately but warning her that he would probably be dead before she arrived. He said he saw "the white light" when he died for a "few seconds" . during the middle of shooting he was hit with a bout of spinal meningitis, causing him to go into a coma and he admits he "dug his feet in" so as not to pass away.
He said: "I got sick in the middle of shooting 'Kelly's Heroes'. I came to Yugoslavia for a day's filming and I was out for six weeks.
"They took me to hospital – I had spinal meningitis. They didn't have the antibiotics, so I went into a coma, and they tell me that for a few seconds, I died. I saw the blue tunnel, and I started going down it. I saw the white light. I dug my feet in."
However, Donald was tempted for a second to stop fighting to stay alive.
He added: "I didn't want to go – but it was incredibly tempting. You just go: 'Aw, s**t man, why not?'. "
At the beginning of the movie, Big Joe (Telly Savalas) is desperate to know about the best places to stay in the city of Nancy, and he uses a Michelin tourist guide book. Use of these books by Allied troops during WWIi is accurate. When planning the Normandy invasion, staff officers were concerned about how the troops would navigate in light of the possibility that retreating Germans would take down or reverse road signs. The U.S. government quietly reprinted the most recent edition from 1939, as new publications had been suspended because of the war. So when Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normany on June 6, 1944, they carried the Michelin guides and, for the remainder of the war, advancing forces depended on their Michelin maps.
During filming in Yugoslavia in 1969, Donald Sutherland (Oddball) received word, via co-star Clint Eastwood (Lieutenant Kelly), that his then-wife Shirley Douglas was arrested: she had tried to buy--using a personal check--hand grenades from an undercover FBI agent for the Black Panthers. Sutherland recounts this story often, mentioning that when Eastwood got to the part about the personal check, he laughed so hard that he fell to his knees and Sutherland had to help him up. Eastwood then put his arm around Sutherland, walked him down the hill that overlooked the Yugoslavian countryside, and assured his friend of his complete support with his predicament. Sutherland and Douglas, who are the parents of Kiefer Sutherland and twin sister Rachel Sutherland, divorced in 1970.
The movie was mainly filmed in Yugoslavia because the Yugoslavian army still had a large quantity of Sherman tanks in 1970.
Big Joe quote:
Look, we're not worried about the German Army - we've got enough troubles of our own. To the right, General Patton. To the left, the British Army. To the rear, our own goddamn artillery! And, besides all that, it's rainin'. And, the only good thing to say about the weather: it keeps our Air Corps from blowin' us all to Hell because it's too lousy to fly! Verstehen?!?
