The Dirty Dozen, 1967.
Directed by Robert Aldrich.
Starring Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Sutherland, George Kennedy, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Richard Jaeckel, and Robert Ryan.
SYNOPSIS:
During World War II, a rebellious U.S. Army Major is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead them into a mass assassination mission of German officers.
It is spring of 1944 and rebellious OSS officer Major John Reisman (Lee Marvin) has been called in by Major General Sam Worden (Ernest Borgnine) to ‘volunteer’ to undertake Project Amnesty, a top secret mission that involves taking 12 of the US Army’s worst convicts and training them to the level of elite commando before sending them on what is potentially a suicide mission to eliminate Wehrmacht officers at a château near Rennes, France, in an effort to disrupt the German chain of command in the area ahead of D-Day.
At first the 12 prisoners are a wild and insolent bunch but Reisman’s harsh tactics start to win them over and they begin to gel as a team, and with the promise of a temporary amnesty from their crimes if they survive the unit have something to aim for. However, other members of the top brass, who are unaware of the mission, don’t see that a ragtag group of convicts have the necessary skills to pull off anything successfully and try to find out what is going on, forcing Reisman to put his men to the test against jobsworth Colonel Breed (Robert Ryan) and his squad before being sent out on their real mission.
And of course, the real mission is what makes up the final act of this movie, much like with the book it is based on. Before that, The Dirty Dozen is one of those stories that we have seen in cinema dozens – if not hundreds – of times, where a group of ne’er-do-wells have to go through hell and back again to prove their worth, with the prize being they get to live, and coming as it did in 1967 it was far enough away from World War II that filmmakers could start being a bit playful with the subject, but with it still being fresh in the minds of those involved so that it felt authentic.
With it being the late 1960s, the Vietnam War was also in the public consciousness and the tide was turning on the US government once the reports of what was happening got back, so having an ensemble cast of actors to play the various misfits helped The Dirty Dozen appeal to all audiences regardless of political persuasion, with the old-school heroics of the WWII era represented by Lee Marvin and Richard Jaeckel as Sergeant Bowren mixed with the anti-authority attitudes of the era the movie was made in reflected in John Cassavetes’ Victor Franko and Jim Brown’s Robert Jefferson, the only black soldier in the squad who also faces his own discriminations away from being a convicted criminal.
Also in the mix you have characters like Telly Savalas’ Archer J. Maggott – who was convicted of rape and has a religious mindset, so you know where his head is at most of the time – and Charles Bronson’s Joseph Wladislaw, who doesn’t really fall into any particular viewpoint and seems to represent ‘the common man’, ploughing his own field and not really playing the game as far as the command goes but also acting with a sense of duty and respect to those who earn it.
But politics aside, The Dirty Dozen is best viewed as an action movie with the Americans on one side, the Germans on the other and we know where we need to be by the time the credits roll. Lee Marvin is the heart and soul of the movie, his tough but fair demeanor clearly an inspiration for commanding officers in countless military movies made after this; just watch Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Burton in The Wild Geese or Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge and you can see John Reisman in all of them. The other characters are not nice people but you spend enough time with them that you get to see what makes them tick, and even if you don’t like them you still cheer them on in the final act when they are sticking it to enemy. If it were made today, no doubt the characters would be written to reflect the modern challenges that soldiers and prisoners face, but here we have what could be classed as stereotypes as we need to hit certain beats so we have murderers, rapists, thugs and generally flawed people not necessarily looking for redemption, just trying to get something back from the system that failed them.
Released by Arrow Video, this limited edition set comes with the main movie on 4K UHD featuring a new audio commentary by film scholars Alain Silver and James Ursini, plus an archive cast and crew commentary, and it looks great, with skin tones looking natural and with sharp levels of detail. There are inconsistencies where it goes out of focus for brief moments, but this is due to Arrow having to replace missing or damaged frames in the source material. The movie is nearly 60 years old and you can only work with what you have, so with that in mind the restoration is excellent.
The standard Blu-ray contains the bulk of the extras, the best of which is The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, the 1985 made-for-TV sequel that sees Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Richard Jaeckel return with a new cast – including Predator’s Sonny Landham and Superman III’s Gavan O’Herlihy – in what is basically a remake still set in WWII (although the date of the events is different, so if you view it as a sequel then Reisner, Worden and Bowren have aged quite a bit in six months). It is in 4:3 standard definition but for a bit of extra fun with those characters it is a nice inclusion. Also on the disc is an appreciation by film historian Kim Newman, an archival interview with Lee Marvin, a breakdown of Frank De Vol’s score by David Huckvale, an archive making-of featurette and a Navy recruitment film narrated by Lee Marvin, and the set also includes a booklet with essays on the film and director Robert Aldrich.
Overall, The Dirty Dozen is a unique movie in that it represents the point where filmmakers began to view WWII from a distance and with the benefit of hindsight, but also with a sly take on how authority was beginning to be viewed by the public and by soldiers (tellingly, the role of John Reisman was originally offered to John Wayne, who was often seen as the face of US patriotism in the eyes of the public, but he turned it down to make Vietnam War movie The Green Berets). Yes, there are numerous movies that ripped off the men-on-a-mission template but The Dirty Dozen was the first and could well be the best, although at just short of 150 minutes it is overly long despite never being boring. Even so, if you fancy losing yourself in a boy’s own adventure for a few hours then this is the way to do it.
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Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
