Only in a movie with Lee Marvin (and maybe Henry Fonda) could Charles Bronson look like less of a bad ass.
That’s kind of the appeal of “The Dirty Dozen,” a movie with a ridiculously famous cast of already massive and would-be massive stars (Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, John Cassavetes) that was not only a shockingly violent war film but one that defined a generation of war films for years to come.
In many ways, “The Dirty Dozen’s” legacy is more interesting than the movie itself. Mark Harris’s book “Pictures at a Revolution” describes how Robert Aldrich’s film became the biggest box office hit of the year by celebrating a black man killing Germans, by appealing to a counter-culture, anti-establishment movement and by being the first war movie to outwardly call attention to the Vietnam War. Harris writes that the film reached an audience of war fans bored with the genre and craving to see some gritty, tough guy action and teens who disliked the war movies their parents did.
“It would have made a very good, very acceptable 1945 war picture. But I don’t think that a good 1945 war picture is a good 1967 war picture,” Aldrich was quoted in Harris’s book. And in that way, it was one of the many films that year that revolutionized filmmaking.
The problem is, the film remains a clumsy, long action movie that doesn’t really get interesting until the two big battles in the last hour. It spends a lot of time developing at least half of the dozen war criminals assigned to Major Reisman’s (Marvin) command, but the writing doesn’t have the sharp tenacity or wit to make it truly compelling.
Exploitation films and similar, even more polarizing fare like Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” merely two years later would surpass it in the violence department, and New Wave Hollywood directors were not far away from making less than oblique statements about the Vietnam War.
Still, it’s influence is obvious. Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” is intentionally lifted from this film’s concept, not to mention the copycat Enzo Castellari version only years after “Dirty Dozen.”
But what bugged me was how almost hokey the film felt. I think the whole construction montage for instance is time that could easily be trimmed from the film, and the score really Mickey Mouse’s it in these moments as well. More time should’ve been spent highlighting the film’s theme of authority and power dynamics to make this an outwardly counter cultural film. That would’ve made it more timeless as well.
“Dirty Dozen” does aim to have fun, plain and simple, and that’s its appeal. But there are better ways to spend your time.