The Dirty Dozen (1967)

This film stands up remarkably well after half a century and the casting separates the men from the boys in the sense that the real actors like Robert Ryan went on getting work for years afterwards while the flavor-of-the-month school like Telly Savalas plus the out-and-out novelty castings like Trini Lopez enjoyed a mayfly moment and then found their natural level. It was a workable idea and movies with numbers - The Magnificent Seven, Ocean's Eleven - tended to score by a combination of potent names and a decent script. This is no exception and it has another factor going for it i.e. the three stages; 1) Recruitment, 2) Training, 3) the caper and/or mission, all designed to generate interest segueing into suspense. Whilst it can be faulted if one puts ones' mind to it it is also easy to score it eight out of ten for all three stages.

Everyone talks about this movie like it's a classic -- and it is. But the strange thing about The Dirty Dozen is that all the great moments happen in the first two thirds of the movie. The training scenes and the arguments between the men are all much more suspenseful, dangerous, and realistic than anything that actually happens when they finally go into combat. The one scene that always grabs me time after time is the scene where the super tough Major, played by Lee Marvin, bullies the big, simple guy (the one they call Posey) into attacking him with a knife. This scene is so real that it's like something out of Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men. It's the kind of thing just about every guy has seen or experienced in life, on the playground, in the locker room, wherever. And yet as incredible as it is, what's the payoff? It's not as if Posey stabs Hitler at the end of the movie with a knife. The commando raid turns into a shambles, almost everyone gets killed, but there's no real explanation of what went wrong, or why, or whether the Dirty Dozen actually accomplished anything or not. Maybe that's the point, but I still feel like the ending was a weak payoff for a movie with a spectacular buildup and great character development.

The Dirty Dozen (1967) This is a war action movie. Truly one of the first of its kind to concentrate on the action, with a sprinkling of comedy via the burgeoning brotherhood of the men. A prominent Major trains a small band of the Army's worst convicts to be sent on a virtual suicide mission. The cast includes Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Robert Webber, and Donald Sutherland. The film is based on the novel of the same name. It was inspired by a real- life group called the "Filthy Thirteen". On release, the film was picked apart for its level of violence, but was a massive commercial success. It presently holds a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for four Academy Awards. It spawned numerous sequels, copycats, and was the inspiration for many subsequent movies in the genre. This is a classic American film of the era, and a must watch for the action enthusiasts.

I loved this. Right up there with my favourite Aldrich films (though maybe 'Kiss Me Deadly' is still my number one), and of the greatest performances of both Lee Marvin and John Cassavetes (who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at both the Golden Globes and Oscars for his work here).This hearkened back to the heady times when if you got a great cast and director together, you were virtually guaranteed you'd come out of it, because of comparatively little studio interference, with a bonafide classic piece of cinema. People thought the studio system was broken and needed fixing, by films such as 'Easy Rider'? THIS, along with other fine Aldrich works from this period, age a lot better and hold up much finer today than Dennis Hopper's so-called 'masterpiece' and its ilk.