The Dirty Dozen (Seven Arts Productions, MKH, MGM, 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After David Frost vs. The Beatles on May 26, 2025 I changed to Turner Classic Movies for another artefact of the 1960’s: Robert Aldrich’s 1967 World War II film The Dirty Dozen. TCM’s host for this one, Dave Karger, said that when MGM green-lighted this film they thought the audience for it would be “hawks,” supporters of the war in Viet Nam and lovers of the military and its codes of honor and duty. What they didn’t realize was that a lot of anti-war “doves” who wanted the U.S. to withdraw from Viet Nam would embrace the film, too. Watching the movie – which neither Charles nor I had ever seen before – it became clear why anti-war audiences would have embraced it, for The Dirty Dozen – based on a novel by E. M. Nathanson and written by old Hollywood hand Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller, a writer whom director Aldrich had picked up in Germany in an abortive attempt to film Willi Heinrich’s German-centered World War II novel The Cross of Iron – took a jaundiced view of the military and made its rituals look ridiculous. The central character is U.S. Army Major John Reisman (Lee Marvin), who in the opening scene witnesses a soldier being hanged for murder. Just before the noose is tightened and the trap door released, he pleads that he didn’t mean to kill the victim, but the hanging goes on anyway. Then Reisman is given an order to recruit 12 Army prisoners, sentence either to be hanged or to long prison terms, to be trained for a commando mission against a castle at Rennes-le-Chateau, France (best known as the headquarters of the Priory of Sion, the secret society made famous by Dan Brown in his novel The Da Vinci Code) where many of the major German army officers hang out for rest and recreation.

Among the unlikely recruits for this mission are Joseph T. Wladislaw (Charles Bronson, establishing the action-hero cred that would largely define him in the 1970’s); Robert T. Jefferson (football hero Jim Brown, who naturally is given a scene in which he gets to do what he was most famous for, run really fast); the anti-social Victor R. Franko (John Cassavetes) who was a Mob hit man in Chicago; the religious fanatic Archer J. Maggott (Telly Savalas before he became a cop on the long-running TV detective show Kojak) who killed a prostitute because he thought (delusionally) that the Lord was telling him to; Vernon Pinkley (Donald Sutherland); Glenn Gilpin (Ben Carruthers); Seth Sawyer (Colin Maitland); Tassos Bravos (Al Mancini); Roscoe Lever (Stuart Cooper); Milo Vladek (Tom Busby); and Pedro Jiminez (pop singer Trini Lopez, who gets to sing a pretty good song called “The Bramble Bush” in the film). Much of the movie is taken up by Reisman’s training sessions to turn his unlikely recruits into an effective commando unit, which takes up the first 90 minutes of this 165-minute film, followed by a war games sequence that takes up so much time it’s only in the last 45 minutes or so that the Dirty Dozen actually face the enemy. Reisman had been given the assignment by General Worden (Ernest Borgnine, surprisingly effective as an asshole after all the sympathetic roles he’d played in films like Marty and TV shows like McHale’s Navy), and there’s a long-running antagonism between him and his nominal commanding officer, Col. Everett Dasher Breed (Robert Ryan). One complication is that Reisman is under strict orders not to tell anyone who his recruits are or what they’re being trained to do, which leads to a bizarre confrontation in a base-camp latrine between Wladislaw and two MP’s who, acting under orders from Col. Breed, beat the shit out of him to get him to give up the secret.

At Reisman’s insistence, the men in his unit are promised full pardons if they survive the mission. Franko nearly blows it for them when he refuses to shave with cold water while other people on the base are allowed hot water, and when he’s told no, he and the other Dozen respond by refusing to shave or bathe at all. Reisman actually likes this turn of events because it shows that the Dozen are taking responsibility for each other and behaving as a unit instead of rowdy, rambunctious individuals. There’s a great scene in which a U.S. Army band is on hand to play standard-issue marches like John Philip Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis” and “The Thunderer” and Edwin Bagley’s “National Emblem,” only Col. Breed keeps ordering the band to stop so he can deliver a meaningless and interminable speech. One of the best things about The Dirty Dozen is precisely its irreverence towards the military and its rituals that John Ford was so serious about in his war films. There’s a great scene in which Reisman orders Pinkley to impersonate a general inspecting his troops – when Pinkley asks how he can pass himself off as a general, Reisman tells him, “That’s easy, Just walk past them and look stupid” – anticipating Donald Sutherland’s star-making role as “Hawkeye” Pierce in the 1970 film M*A*S*H, another irreverent look at the Army and its rituals. Col. Breed demands that the Dozen prove their ability to function as a unit, and Reisman takes the bait by assigning them to a war-games exercise (though for something that’s supposed to be a practice battle, there are an awful lot of explosions and fires that make it look like they’re using live ammo) and having them “capture” the base commanders by disguising themselves as the other side in the games. This is an ironic reflection of what will happen to them when they actually attack the castle at Rennes, in which some of them will be disguised as German officers so they can slip into the castle undetected until the others are ready for the kill.

When the attack happens – minus one of the Dozen, whose parachute deposits him in an apple tree and breaks his back so they have to abandon him to his death – the Germans realize their supposedly safe space has been infiltrated and they hide in a cellar they’re using as an improvised bomb shelter. Reisman orders his men to throw hand grenades and gasoline down the cellar’s ventilation shafts, then having Jefferson set fire to them. It’s an ironic reflection, which Aldrich and his writers may have intended, of what the real-life Nazis were doing to Jews in the infamous gas chambers at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other places. Ultimately about half the Dirty Dozen escape while the others get killed as part of the mission, and Reisman makes sure that the survivors get their promised pardons and the families of the dead ones get letters that their sons died honorable deaths in battle. In his interview for the Charles Higham/Joel Greenberg book The Celluloid Muse (1969), Robert Aldrich recalled that, “although I had arranged with [producer Kenneth] Hyman to do the casting and the cutting, Metro hired John Wayne. Now I’m a Wayne fan. His politics don’t bother me, that’s his mother’s problem. But you don’t get John Wayne to play a Lee Marvin part. Anyway, after a lot of unnecessary, unpleasant abrasion, Wayne himself decided not to play the part.” The Dirty Dozen became an important way-stop for Lee Marvin’s improbable rise from villain-role typecasting to stardom, first in the 1965 comedy Western Cat Ballou (in which Marvin played a dual role, an implacable bad guy and an alcoholic good guy who was the model for Gene Wilder’s character in Blazing Saddles), then in this and ultimately in anti-hero action roles like Point Blank (1967) and Prime Cut (1972). The Dirty Dozen is a surprisingly good movie, and I think I read somewhere that Quentin Tarantino modeled the big action sequence in his own World War II movie, Inglourious Basterds (2009), on The Dirty Dozen. I’m glad I finally caught up with this quite remarkable film which I’d always written off, without seeing it, as a pro-war propaganda-fest.