The Dirty Dozen
With Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson.
US, 1967, digital video, color, 149 min.
Copy source: New Beverly Cinema
Alpha male screen legends (Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Charles Bronson) and feisty newcomers (John Cassavetes, Ben Carruthers) join forces in the robust ensemble of The Dirty Dozen, a WWII actioner as much about testosterone-fueled psychosis as it is about the dysfunction of the military machine. The scenario, based on an E.M. Nathanson novel, fits Aldrich like a glove: Marvin’s cranky Army major is forced to rally together a lineup of death row prisoners and other miscreants to execute a suicidal invasion of a Nazi gathering on the eve of D-Day, a mission requiring weeks of arduous training. The toxic brew of unchecked masculinity that results provides the director his purest platform for hard-edged satire, a mode that found favor with contemporary audiences as the film rocketed to 1967’s fifth-best box office pull. But although the film did big business, it is hardly a conventional crowd-pleaser. Fully indulging the bad behavior of his self-centered soldiers, Aldrich steers the raucous affair right into the most horrifyingly bloody set piece he ever orchestrated, at which point good-old horseplay veers into moral revulsion.
