War Movie Month: The Dirty Dozen (1967)

A rag-tag assortment of thugs, fuck-ups and ne'er-do-wells are united under the guidance of a blunt and beaten down authority figure to overcome both a monumentous task and the scorn oftheir superiors. Does this remind you of anything?

By many of today's standards Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen is an unimpressive movie. But it is the progenitor of near innumerable tropes and a legacy of on-screen violence and brutality, and yet is often a charming and light-hearted military affair. Lee Marvin leads an ensemble cast as Major Reisman, a blunt, crass and smart-mouthed US Army officer who is the bane of his superiors, most specifically Colonel Breed, and thus is ordered to train and lead a squad of death-row military prisoners to crash a party full of Nazi officers in the lead-up to the June 4th invasion of Nazi-occupied France. Apart from Marvin, the film stars Ernest Borgnine (who stars in the Western anti-hero ensemble The Wild Bunch 2 years after this film), Donald Sutherland, Charles Bronson, George Kennedy, John Cassavettes and Jim Brown. The vast majority of the plot is devoted to Marvin training the Dozen and surreptitiously turning them from a "group of individualists" into a unified fighting unit, then proving their worth on the battlefield to their superior officers, before finally undertaking the mission. Suffice it to say, there is a scarcely any plot present in a 143-minute film.

The training scenes, shenanigans and war-games exercises not only contrast greatly from the third act mission in terms of tone, but in film-making craft as well. The earlier scenes are peppered with un-exciting, though unquestionably solid camera-work and editing, whereas the finale often falters with notable production problems that result in clunky edits and character actions. The off-screen death of the character of Jimenez, played by popular singer and friend of Frank Sinatra, Trini Lopez, was the result of him leaving the production once it had gone over schedule.

The first three-quarters of the Dirty Dozen are peppered with humour, character and wit, whether that is shown through the mocking of officers or the dynamic of the prisoners. Often the officers are shown as goofs and the prisoners as sadists, but this is also reversed. Reisman often employs the men's own distrust and dislike of authority to bind them together, eventually forming an effective and unorthodox unit. It's this aspect of the story that is both the most engaging and the most copied. Films such as the Wild Bunch, Major Payne, Bad News Bears, Guardians of the Galaxy, and many others are based on this simple premise and narrative structure. The Dirty Dozen is also a favourite of Quentin Tarantino's and thus is certainly an inspiration for Inglorious Basterds. And like Basterds, this is also a fictionalised version of accounts, though potentially based on a real-life squad of demolotionists, branded the "Filthy Thirteen".

In the film's finale, several characters take a turn. The most notable turn involves the most unsavoury character in the troupe, the misogynist religious maniac Maggott who betrays the team to murder a German officer's wife in a fit of madness. But, soon after, Reisman and his men trap the guests of the party, Nazi officers and several civilians, in a bomb shelter and proceed to pour grenades and petrol down the air vents with a mind to burn them alive. The unexpected malice of this act, as well as the terrified screams and attempts to stem the tide of petrol and explosives, and slightly preceeding a violent gun-battle, is nothing short of shocking, bordering on bewildering. There'd been no level of violence even remotely close to this before, and several of the acts can be seen as nothing short of sadistic, with little indication of particular sadism towards Nazi's by the Dozen. But by far, the most egregious error of the film is the ending. After defeating the enemy and leaving the compund, three of the surviving members are suddenly teleported by way of cross-dissolve into an unspecified hostpital room, where their superior congratulates them and invites them to rejoin the effort, and then the film ends with a brief credits sequence/memoriam for the Dozen. This sequence is as brief as it is sudden and wholly obtrusive into the film.

"You've seen a general inspecting troops before, haven't you? Just walk slow, act dumb and look stupid!"

The Dirty Dozen is certainly an entertaining, over-masculine war-time romp, that involves little thought but results in a lot of laughs. While the massacre at the end is against tone and suffers from poor editing, it is certainly a sight to behold and the film ends with a bang after plenty of laughs with a diverse and entertaining cast.