1967 lobbycard set
The Dirty Dozen is a
World War II war film
directed by
Robert Aldrich, based on
the novel by
E. M. Nathanson
and starring
Lee Marvin,
Ernest Borgnine,
Telly Savalas,
Charles Bronson and
Jim
Brown.
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 American criminals convicted of capital
offenses, either serving sentences of hard labor or awaiting
execution, and whip them into a unit capable of carrying out the
task.
The
plan, as described, is 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.
The film unfolds in three major acts; the first act identifies and
"recruits" the prisoners, depicts the unit in training and
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 (
Richard
Jaeckel) because of their refusal to shave or bathe as a
protest against their living conditions - prove their worth as
soldiers.
The final act, which was a mere footnote in the novel, is a set
piece action sequence depicting in detail the attack on the
chateau.
Characters
Reisman interviews the dozen convicts chosen for the mission: they
include a
gangster (
John Cassavetes), a psychopath (
Telly Savalas), a cynical ex-officer (
Charles Bronson) and a black activist
(
Jim Brown). They are taken to an isolated
part of the country under the guard of a squad of
military police led by Sergeant Bowren, who
proves an able second-in-command to Reisman.
The Dozen
- Joseph Wladislaw - Sentenced to death by hanging for shooting a
deserting officer
- Robert Jefferson - Sentenced to death by hanging for killing a
'white' officer in self defence
- Victor Franko - Sentenced to death by hanging for killing a
civilian in a botched armed robbery
- Pedro Jiminez - Sentenced to 20 years hard labour
- Archer Maggott - Sentenced to death by hanging for rape and
murder of an English woman
- Vernon Pinkley - Sentenced to 30 years imprisonment
- Samson Posey - Sentenced to death by hanging for accidental
killing of a G.I. in a bar room brawl
- Milo Vladek - Sentenced to 30 years hard labor
- Glenn Gilpin - Sentenced to 30 years hard labor
- Roscoe Lever - Sentenced to 20 years imprisonment
- Tassos Bravos - Sentenced to 20 years hard labor
- Seth Sawyer - Sentenced to 20 years hard labor
The individualists who are the dozen convicts are shown to mature,
grow and coalesce in to a team, at one point resolving to not shave
or bathe until given hot water, hence, becoming
The Dirty
Dozen. Later, they prove their regained military value in a
field training exercise that suits Major Reisman's professional and
personal goals in his feud with Colonel Breed.
The team demonstrates its unity with the operational count-off:
"One: down to the road block, we've just begun; Two: the guards are
through; Three: the Major's men are on a spree; Four: Major and
Wladislaw go through the door; Five: Pinkley stays out in the
drive; Six: the Major gives the rope a fix; Seven: Wladislaw throws
the hook to heaven; Eight: Jiménez has got a date; Nine: the other
guys go up the line; Ten: Sawyer and Gilpin are in the pen; Eleven:
Posey guards points five and seven; Twelve: Wladislaw and the Major
go down to delve; Thirteen: Franko goes up without being seen;
Fourteen: Zero-hour, Jiménez cuts the cable, Franko cuts the phone;
Fifteen: Franko goes in where the others have been; Sixteen: we all
come out like it's Halloween."
Sergeant Bowren is also part of the mission.
Landing in France
, they
discover themselves short one man; Jiménez broke his neck in the
parachute jump. They approach the château gate in German
uniform, shooting (with silenced pistols) and knifing the guards,
commando-style. Wladislaw, who
speaks rudimentary German,
and Reisman enter the château as guests, spill ink on the guest
register so they do not have to
sign in
blackletter script (used for formal purposes in
German society), and go to their room, beginning to sneak in
several of their men.
The plan goes awry when a German woman walks into the room where
Maggot is hiding. He pokes his bayonet to her throat and pushes her
out into the hallway. Yielding to his sadism, he urges her to
scream, then stabs her to death just when she thinks he will not
kill her because she's done as he wished. Downstairs, the Wehrmacht
officers mistake her death scream for passion; only Maggot's
subsequent gunfire alerts them of the attack. Gilpin was to blow up
the rooftop radio-telephone antenna but becomes stuck when his leg
breaches rotting roof slats on the roof. Unable to free himself, he
still blows up the antenna and is killed in the explosion. Panic
ensues and the Germans flee to an underground bomb shelter;
Wladislaw and Reisman lock them in.
Resorting to plan-B, they seed the shelter's air vents with hand
grenades, then pour
gasoline/
petrol down the vent shafts; Jefferson is assigned to
run to each vent, drop a live grenade, and escape.
Meanwhile, most of the Dirty Dozen are killed by
snipers and German soldiers counter-attacking from
the main road. Fighting their way out, Maj. Reisman, Wladislaw,
Sgt. Bowren and Franko escape in a German heavy
half-tracked transport (hot wired by the
criminally-resourceful Franko); Reisman, Bowren and one of the
Dirty Dozen, Wladislaw, survive the suicide mission after Franko,
having boasted that they've made it, gets shot in the back by a
surviving German soldier.
The film concludes in a hospital room where Sgt Bowren on crutches
is shown visiting Reisman and Wladislaw who are bedridden with
broken bones and other serious wounds received in the battle. They
are visited by the general officers, their former tormentors who
sent them on this suicide mission who now have nothing but smiles
and praise for the survivors. Wladislaw is heard to mutter "Oh
boy... killing generals could get to be a habit with me".
Cast
Production
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.
The
English prison camp location scenes were filmed at Ashridge
in Hertfordshire
. 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 movie is remembered for being the one during which
Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown
announced his retirement from football at age 29. Browns' owner
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 (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.
Jack
Palance refused the "Archer Maggot" role when they wouldn't
rewrite the script to make his character lose his racism; Telly
Savalas took the role instead.
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 (in the actual film, however, 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). 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.
Reception and criticism
For the 1960s,
The Dirty Dozen was an unconventional,
extremely violent war film. The violence shocked
Roger Ebert, who, in his first year as a film
reviewer for the
Chicago
Sun-Times, wrote:
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.
Box office performance
This film was the #1 moneymaker of 1967, earning a net profit of
$18,200,000. The film was a box
office hit particularly among young male film goers. It has
remained popular on such revival vehicles as
TBS and
TCM.
Lee
Marvin's character as the cynical and insubordinate maverick
who repeatedly defies and insults the
US
Army brass generated a strong resonance with audiences then and
now. To the discomfort of the
Pentagon, the
film did very well when played on or near US military installations
around the world as well as home.
Truth or fiction?
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.
Capital crime executions in the U.S. Army were
not uncommon; the most famous is that of deserter
Eddie Slovik.
HMP Shepton Mallet
prison was operated by the American military; per
the Visiting Forces Act of 1942,
eighteen men were put to death; sixteen hanged and two
shot.
Despite rumors,
The Dirty Dozen is not based on the
Filthy Thirteen, an airborne
demolition unit documented in the eponymous book. Unlike the
Dirty Dozen, the
Filthy Thirteen were not
convicts.
Prior to D-Day on the evening of the 5th June 1944, many of the
divisional, regimental and staff officers in the German Army
positioned in Normandy (Armee Gruppe B) travelled to Rennes for a
training exercise. The so called 'War Games' to practice the event
of an Allied invasion were planned to start on the 6th June 1944,
bad weather in the area meant a few officers delayed their journey
until the 6th. However there is no evidence to prove that an
operation to kill the top officers of Armee Gruppe B existed or was
even planned.
Sequels and adaptations
Several
made-for-TV movies were
produced in the mid- to late-1980s which capitalized on the
popularity of the first movie.
Lee Marvin
and
Ernest Borgnine reprised their
roles for
The
Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission in , leading a group of
military convicts in a mission to kill a German general who was
plotting to assassinate
Adolf Hitler.
In
The Dirty
Dozen: The Deadly Mission ( )
Telly Savalas, who had played the role of the
psychotic Maggott in the original movie, 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. Ernest Borgnine again reprised his role of
General Worden.
The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal
Mission ( ) depicts
Telly
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, The year also witnessed a short-lived television
series, with no major stars, that lasted only six episodes.
Director
Joe Dante recruited many of the
surviving actors of
The Dirty Dozen to voice the
Small Soldiers in his film
of the same name. Charles Bronson turned him down.
Parody
The television channel
Turner
Classic Movies paid homage to the movie in a television
commercial "Dirty Dozen on Ice" in which scenes of the movie are
shown being played out via an
Ice show in
front of an audience (who are familiar with the story as a
'classic'). Appreciation for the movie is conveyed through the
building of the suspense until the audience's desire for Jefferson
to achieve his mission is palpable, perhaps hoping he makes it out
alive this time. Accolades in the form of flowers are then thrown
to the fallen Jefferson.
In the game Call Of Duty the castle in one of the levels looks
remarkably similar to the one in the film, outside and
inside.
See also
Notes
- p.537 Roberts, Randy & Olsen, James Stuart John Wayne:
American 1997 University of Nebraska Press
-
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=bbkDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA59&dq=%22jack+palance%22+%22dirty+dozen%22
- Commentary The Dirty Dozen: 2-Disc Special
Edition
- Film The Dirty Dozen: 2-Disc Special Edition
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/03/usa.film
- Roger Ebert's review
- Amazon.com: The Filthy Thirteen: From the Dustbowl to
Hitler's Eagle's Nest :The True Story of the101st Airborne's Most
Legendary Squad of Combat Paratroopers: Richard Killblane,Jake
McNiece: Books
- http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Island/3102/small.htm
External links
The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission (1985
TV movie)
The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission (1987
TV movie)
The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission (1988
TV movie)
Dirty Dozen: The Series (1988, TV)
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