The Dirty Dozen ★★★★
BEFORE Michael Bay and James Cameron there were tough-guy Hollywood directors like Sam Peckinpah and Robert Aldrich.
These guys were the real deal, with reputations for uncompromising film-making and masculine themes.
And before today’s action stars like Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham and even Stallone and Schwarzenegger there was the great cast Aldrich pulled together for his WWII action classic The Dirty Dozen.
Released in 1967, the principal cast featured a range of current and upcoming stars, many of whom were also war veterans in real life.
How’s this for a line-up – Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, George Kennedy, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, NFL champion Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas and man-mountain Clint Walker.
Audiences went in droves to see the stars playing a group of army convicts on a suicide mission behind enemy lines.
As a result the film made nearly 10 times its original budget, giving Aldrich the opportunity to make some off-centre fare during the next decade, such as Hustle, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, The Longest Yard and The Choirboys.
The Dirty Dozen is more standard cinema, although the ruthless manner in which the team treat not just the enemy but also their wives makes it stand out even for this time.
Set in 1944, the screenplay is based on a 1965 bestseller that was apparently inspired by a real-life WWII unit of behind-the-lines demolition specialists.
Marvin plays tough-as-nails Major John Reisman who is ordered to recruit train some of the Army’s worst prisoners to win filtrate a German chateau and eliminate as many high-ranking officers as possible. The prisoners who survive the mission will receive pardons for their crimes.
Of the 12 Reisman chooses, five have already been condemned to death for murders while the others are facing lengthy sentences.
The prison psychologist warns Reisman that all of them will likely kill him if given the chance to escape and rapist/killer Maggot, played by Savalas, is the most dangerous.
Reisman viciously asserts his authority and the prisoners initially bond over their hatred of him.
But slowly a loose comraderie does develop with several of the condemned men becoming the natural leaders motivated by having at least some chance to live and be soldiers again.
The actual mission is a full-throttle action sequence for the last 30 minutes of the film which is also impressively staged around the chateau set which was actually built and filmed in England.
This final sequence doesn’t play out exactly the way you expect with one of the team reverting to type and putting the entire mission in jeopardy.
All the cast have their moments in the sun, including a number of death scenes that push the film into more of a modern depiction of war.
Best are probably Marvin, Cassavetes, Savalas and, perhaps surprisingly, Walker.
Bronson added this to his good roles in two other classic ensemble action/adventures, The Great Escape and the original version of The Magnificent Seven.