#289: The Dirty Dozen
Raw, subversive and awesome
This review was originally posted to Twitter on July 4, 2020.
Initial release: June 15, 1967
Director: Robert Aldritch
War movies carry a certain expectation of heroism. They’re meant to be tales of derring-do, of lantern-jawed heroes surmounting impossible odds. This was especially true in the couple of decades after World War 2, when Hollywood got to work mythologizing the Allied effort, especially that of the Americans. As the Vietnam War heated up, so too did the World War 2 movie business, all of them emphasizing the narrative of red-blooded American patriots marching to victory.
But not Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen.
It’s an unconventional movie in a lot of ways. The protagonists — mostly murderers and deserters — are not heroes. The mission is not terribly noble — storm a party full of Nazi officers in a French chateau the night before D-Day and kill everyone inside. The way they do it? Basically a war crime.
But therein lies the greatness of this film. It’s rough and gritty, often just laugh-out-loud, a bloody, grinning, violent, slapstick comedy released at the height of the Vietnam War that revels in what must have seemed like the height of obscenity in 1967.
Twelve men, each one of them murderers, scumbags, and a token rapist the film immediately absolves the audience from rooting for, have been given the chance to engage in a suicide mission. Survive, and their sentences are commuted. Fail, and, well, they were doomed to die anyway.
Under the wing of Major Reisman (Lee Marvin), himself prone to insubordination and a tendency to exceed orders, these twelve men are beaten into shape and into a fighting unit, ready to do what needs to be done, no matter how filthy they are, or how profane. With names like Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, Jim Brown (who famously gave up a career in the NFL for this film), and even Ernest Borgnine in a small role as a general, you can rest assured that a character-driven film like this will be an overachiever in that regard. After being fed a steady diet all throughout the 1960s of classic spy/action movies like The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, all of which are in the mold of James Bond, a film like The Dirty Dozen seems like a breath of fresh air. It’s funny, it’s violent, it’s subversive.
While Savalas is masterful in his role as Maggott, an unhinged, racist, Bible-beating, woman-hating southern-fried psychopath, it’s really Jim Brown in his role as Jefferson, the lone black member of this squad, that stands out. “That’s your war, not mine,” he says, a line that echoes the sentiment of Black America in the Vietnam era; the climax of the film explicitly has Jefferson be instrumental in the final execution of the mission: trapping dozens of Nazis in a basement armory then blowing it up. It’s this final scene that offended a lot of sensibilities, when bags full of grenades, then gallons of gasoline, are poured down the air vents, before the whole lot is set alight. It pretty much amounts to a war crime — but are we supposed to feel bad for Nazis?
This is a brutally irreverent, uncompromising, outright insurrectionist film that subverts everything we’ve come to expect from the war genre. Films like M*A*S*H, Inglourious Basterds and, for better or worse, Suicide Squad would likely not exist without this movie. So say what you will, but it’s a film that speaks to the era. You want to talk obscenity? Let’s talk about the Vietnam War. Let’s talk about the institutional racism we’re still dealing with even now. Let’s talk about how we just can’t seem to get rid of the Nazis.
And if we can’t do that, let’s just watch this movie, the pinnacle of that vicious, macho style of entertainment where even if the heroes aren’t supposed to be likeable, at least we don’t have to feel bad for the villains.
