The Dirty Dozen

The Dirty Dozen
Original poster by Frank McCarthy
Directed by	Robert Aldrich
Produced by	Kenneth Hyman
Written by	Novel: E. M. Nathanson Screenplay: Nunnally Johnson Lukas Heller
Starring	Lee Marvin Ernest Borgnine Charles Bronson Jim Brown John Cassavetes Richard Jaeckel George Kennedy Trini Lopez Ralph Meeker Robert Ryan Telly Savalas Robert Webber Clint Walker
Music by	Frank De Vol
Cinematography	Edward Scaife
Editing by	Michael Luciano
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s)	June 15, 1967
Running time	150 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$45,300,000 (US)

The Dirty Dozen is a 1967 film directed by Robert Aldrich and released by MGM. It was filmed in England and features an ensemble cast, including Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas and Robert Webber. The film is based on E. M. Nathanson's novel of the same name that was potentially inspired by a real life group called the "Filthy Thirteen".

Plot

In England, in the spring of 1944, Allied forces are preparing for the D-Day invasion. Among them are Major John Reisman (Lee Marvin), an OSS officer; his commander, Regular Army Major General Worden (Ernest Borgnine), and his former commander Colonel Everett Dasher Breed (Robert Ryan). Early in the film the personalities of the three men are shown to clash and the characters of the individualistic Reisman and the domineering Breed are established.

Major Reisman is assigned an unusual and top-secret pre-invasion mission: take twelve soldiers convicted of felony offenses, either serving prison sentences or condemned to death, and turn them into a unit capable of carrying out a specific task. They are to infiltrate a château near Rennes, in Brittany, used as a retreat for senior Wehrmacht officers, on the eve of the invasion. Without having complete intelligence as to the identity of the guests, it was felt that the elimination of officers in the German high command or senior staff could cripple or confuse the German military's ability to respond at the time of crisis. It is quickly established that both Reisman and the generals with whom he frequently clashes consider the mission to be a suicidal long shot. After a long period of convincing and training the men, they are deployed to attack a chateau in enemy occupied France, housing German commanders, intending to disrupt the German command structure. After the parachute drop, the dozen discover that Jiminez broke his neck on landing. The others then proceed to the chateau, eliminating several German officers and stealing their car in the process. The Dozen then launch their attack, in which they are picked off one by one. Maggott betrays the dozen and kills a German woman, only to be shot dead by Jefferson. The others see that the German officers and their mistresses have fled into an underground bunker only accessible by several air vents, through which the dozen drop grenades and gasoline, which is then ignited, killing all the officers, but also all the women. The remaining members of the Dozen then escape in a German half-track. the film then cuts to a scene where the survivors are shown to be Major Reisman, Sergeant Bowren and Wladislaw.

The film unfolds in three major acts;

Act one - Identification and "recruiting" the prisoners

After witnessing a hanging in a military jail in London, Major Reisman is briefed on the mission at General Worden's headquarters. As the credits to the film are rolling he walks along the line of 12 prisoners and stares at each of them as Sergeant Bowren (Richard Jaeckel) reads out their sentences.

On March 19, Reisman visits Franko, Wladislaw, Maggott, Posey and Jefferson in their cells. Some details of their crimes are revealed and he uses a different approach with each of them in an effort to gain their cooperation.

Act two - Training

Depicts the unit building their own compound and training for the mission. It highlights the interpersonal conflict between the men, some of whom see the mission as a chance for redemption and others as a chance for escape. The second act places the mission, and the characters, in jeopardy when a breach of military regulations on Reisman's part forces General Worden, at Breed's urging, to have the men—now dubbed the "Dirty Dozen" by Sergeant Bowren because of their refusal to shave or bathe as a protest against their living conditions—prove their worth as soldiers at 'divisional manoeuvres', a wargame in "Devonshire".

Act three - The mission

The final act, which was a mere footnote in the novel, is an action sequence detailing the attack on the chateau. The men recite the details of the attack in a chant in order to remember their roles:

1. Down to the road block, we've just begun
2. The guards are through
3. The Major's men are on a spree
4. Major and Wladislaw go through the door
5. Pinkley stays out in the drive
6. The Major gives the rope a fix
7. Wladislaw throws the hook to heaven
8. Jiminez has got a date
9. The other guys go up the line
10. Sawyer and Gilpin are in the pen
11. Posey guards points five and seven
12. Wladislaw and the Major go down to delve
13. Franko goes up without being seen
14. Zero-hour - Jiminez cuts the cable, Franko cuts the phone
15. Franko goes in where the others have been
16. We all come out like it's Halloween

Cast

• Lee Marvin as Maj. John Reisman
• Ernest Borgnine as Maj. Gen. Worden
• Charles Bronson as Joseph Wladislaw
• Jim Brown as Robert T. Jefferson
• John Cassavetes as Victor R. Franko
• Richard Jaeckel as Sgt. Clyde Bowren
• George Kennedy as Maj. Max Armbruster
• Trini Lopez as Pedro Jiminez
• Ralph Meeker as Capt. Stuart Kinder
• Robert Ryan as Col. Everett Dasher Breed
• Telly Savalas as Archer J. Maggott
• Donald Sutherland as Vernon L. Pinkley
• Clint Walker as Samson Posey
• Robert Webber as Brig. Gen. Denton
• Tom Busby as Milo Vladek
• Ben Carruthers as Glenn Gilpin
• Stuart Cooper as Roscoe Lever
• Robert Phillips as Cpl. Carl Morgan
• Al Mancini as Tassos R. Bravos
• Colin Maitland as Seth K. Sawyer

Production

Aldbury - scene of the wargame

Bradenham Manor - Wargames HQ

Although Robert Aldrich had tried to buy the rights to E.M. Nathanson's novel The Dirty Dozen while it was just an outline, MGM succeeded in May 1963. The novel was a best-seller upon publication in 1965.

Filming took place at the MGM British Studios, Boreham Wood and the English prison camp location scenes were filmed at Ashridge in Hertfordshire. Wargame scenes were filmed at the village of Aldbury and Bradenham Manor in Buckinghamshire featured as 'Wargames Headquarters'. Beechwood Park School in Markyate was also used as a location during the school's summer holidays, appearing in the film as a military hospital.^[1]

The château was built especially for the production, by art director William Hutchinson. It was 240 ft wide and 50 ft high, surrounded with 5,400 sq. yds. of heather, 400 ferns, 450 shrubs, 30 spruce trees and 6 weeping willows. Construction of the faux château proved problematic. The script required its explosion, but it was so solid that 70 tons of explosives would have been required for the effect. Instead, a cork and plastic section was destroyed.

The film is remembered for being the one during which Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown announced his retirement from football at age 29. The owner of the Browns, Art Modell, demanded Brown choose between football and acting. With Brown's considerable accomplishments in the sport (he was already the NFL's all-time leading rusher, was predominantly ahead statistically of the second-leading rusher, and his team had won the 1964 NFL Championship), he chose acting. Despite his early retirement from football, Brown remains the league's eighth all-time leading rusher, the Cleveland Browns all-time leading rusher, and the only player in league history to have a career average 100 yards per game. In some form of tribute, Art Modell himself said in Spike Lee's Jim Brown: All American documentary, that he made a huge mistake in forcing Jim Brown to choose between football and Hollywood and if he had it to do over again, he would never have made such a demand. Modell fined Jim Brown the equivalent of over $100 per day, a fine which Brown said that "today wouldn't even buy the doughnuts for a team".

Casting

The cast included many World War II US veterans, including (but not limited to) Robert Webber and Robert Ryan (Marines), Telly Savalas and Charles Bronson (Army), Ernest Borgnine (Navy) and Clint Walker (Merchant Marine). Marvin served as a Private First Class in the US Marines in the Pacific War and provided technical assistance with uniforms and weapons to create realistic portrayals of combat, yet bitterly complained about the falsity of some scenes. He thought Reisman's wresting the bayonet from the enraged Posey to be particularly phony. Aldrich replied that the plot was preposterous, and that by the time the audience had left the cinema, they would have been so overwhelmed by action, explosions, and killing, that they would have forgotten the lapses.

John Wayne was the original choice for Reisman, but he turned down the role because he objected to the adultery present in the original script, which featured the character having a relationship with an Englishwoman whose husband was fighting on the Continent.^[2] Jack Palance refused the "Archer Maggott" role when they wouldn't rewrite the script to make his character lose his racism; Telly Savalas took the role instead.^[3]

Six of the Dozen were experienced American stars whilst the "Back Six" were actors resident in the UK, Englishman Colin Maitland, Canadians Donald Sutherland and Tom Busby, and Americans Stuart Cooper, Al Mancini and Ben Carruthers. According to commentary on The Dirty Dozen: 2-Disc Special Edition when Trini López left the film early, the death scene of Lopez's character where he blew himself up with the radio tower was given to Busby^[4] (in the film, it is Ben Carruthers' character Glenn Gilpin who is tasked with blowing up the radio tower while Busby's character Milo Vladek is shot in front of the château).^[5] The same commentary also states that the impersonation of the General scene was to have been done by Clint Walker who thought the scene demeaning to his character who was a native American. Aldrich picked out Sutherland for the bit.^[6]

Reception and criticism

In response to the violence of the film, Roger Ebert, in his first year as a film reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote sarcastically:

"I'm glad the Chicago Police Censor Board forgot about that part of the local censorship law where it says films shall not depict the burning of the human body. If you have to censor, stick to censoring sex, I say...but leave in the mutilation, leave in the sadism and by all means leave in the human beings burning to death. It's not obscene as long as they burn to death with their clothes on."^[7]

In another contemporary review, Bosley Crowther called it "an astonishingly wanton war film" and a "studied indulgence of sadism that is morbid and disgusting beyond words"; he also noted:

"It is not simply that this violent picture of an American military venture is based on a fictional supposition that is silly and irresponsible.... But to have this bunch of felons a totally incorrigible lot, some of them psychopathic, and to try to make us believe that they would be committed by any American general to carry out an exceedingly important raid that a regular commando group could do with equal efficiency — and certainly with greater dependability — is downright preposterous."^[8]

Crowther called some of the portrayals "bizarre and bold":

"Marvin's taut, pugnacious playing of the major ... is tough and terrifying. John Cassavetes is wormy and noxious as a psychopath condemned to death, and Telly Savalas is swinish and maniacal as a religious fanatic and sex degenerate. Charles Bronson as an alienated murderer, Richard Jaeckel as a hard-boiled military policeman, and Jim Brown as a white-hating Negro stand out in the animalistic group."^[8]

Variety was more positive, calling it an "exciting Second World War pre-D-Day drama" based on a "good screenplay" with a "ring of authenticity to it"; they drew particular attention to the performances by Marvin, Cassavetes, and Bronson.^[9]

The Time Out Film Guide notes that over the years, "The Dirty Dozen has taken its place alongside that other commercial classic, The Magnificent Seven:

"The violence which liberal critics found so offensive has survived intact. Aldrich sets up dispensable characters with no past and no future, as Marvin reprieves a bunch of death row prisoners, forges them into a tough fighting unit, and leads them on a suicide mission into Nazi France. Apart from the values of team spirit, cudgeled by Marvin into his dropout group, Aldrich appears to be against everything: anti-military, anti-Establishment, anti-women, anti-religion, anti-culture, anti-life. Overriding such nihilism is the super-crudity of Aldrich's energy and his humour, sufficiently cynical to suggest that the whole thing is a game anyway, a spectacle that demands an audience."^[10]

The film currently holds a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 21 reviews.^[11]

Awards

The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning in the category Best Sound Effects.^[12]

• Actor in a Supporting Role (John Cassavetes)
• Film Editing (Michael Luciano)
• Sound
• Sound Effects (John Poyner) (Won)

Box office performance

This film was the #1 moneymaker of 1967, earning a net profit of $18,200,000.^[13]

Basis in fact

The Dirty Dozen is not the story of a real unit. In the prologue to the novel, Nathanson states that, while he heard a legend that such a unit may have existed, he was unable to find any corroboration in the archives of the US Army in Europe.

However, there was a unit called the "Filthy Thirteen", an airborne demolition unit documented in the eponymous book,^[14] and this unit's exploits inspired the fictional account. Barbara Maloney, the daughter of John Agnew, a private in the Filthy Thirteen, told the American Valor Quarterly that her father felt that 30% of the movie's content was historically correct, including a scene where officers are captured. Unlike the Dirty Dozen, the Filthy Thirteen were not convicts; however, they were men prone to drinking and fighting and often spent time in the stockade.^[15][16]

Both the Germans and Russians used convicted men in high risk operations during the war.

Sequels and adaptations

Three years after The Dirty Dozen was released, Too Late the Hero—a film also directed by Aldrich—was described as a "kind of sequel to The Dirty Dozen".^[17] The 1969 Michael Caine film Play Dirty follows a similar theme of convicts-recruited-as-soldiers.

Several made-for-TV movies were produced in the mid- to late-1980s which capitalized on the popularity of the first film. Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine reprised their roles for The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission in 1985, leading a group of military convicts in a mission to kill a German general who was plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler.^[18] In The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission (1987), Telly Savalas, who had played the role of the psychotic Maggott in the original film, assumed the different role of Major Wright, an officer who leads a group of military convicts to extract a group of German scientists who are being forced to make a deadly nerve gas.^[19] Ernest Borgnine again reprised his role of General Worden. The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission (1988) depicts Savalas's Wright character and a group of renegade soldiers attempting to prevent a group of extreme German generals from starting a Fourth Reich, with Erik Estrada co-starring and Ernest Borgnine again playing the role of General Worden.^[20] In 1988, FOX aired a short-lived television series, with no major stars, that lasted only eleven episodes.^[21]

References

External links

• The Dirty Dozen at the Internet Movie Database
• The Dirty Dozen at AllRovi
• The Dirty Dozen at the TCM Movie Database