The Dirty Dozen is a WWII movie starring Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Earnest Borgnine, Donald Sutherland, Clint Walker, Jim Brown, Telly Savalas, John Cassavetes, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Trini Lopez, Tom Busby, and Robert Ryan.
Major Reisman (Marvin) is a soldier with a history of, if not insubordination, then a creative approach to following orders. He gets voluntold for a mission to kill off a bunch of the German high command. Effectively a suicide mission, his team is composed of 12 men sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment for various violent crimes (but mostly murder). He whips them into shape, gets them to work as a unit, and then successfully executes the mission. Well, "successful" inasmuch as they kill the people they're supposed to kill, but of the "dirty dozen," only one, Wladislaw (Bronson) survives.
The story's pretty straightforward, and there are bits that are important that I'm glossing right over, of course. The strength of the movie are the performances of Marvin, Bronson, and Cassevetes (who was nominated for an Oscar), and the script - this was a WWII movie portraying American soldiers as violent assholes blowing up imprisoned enemies and women, and sure, they're killing Nazis, but that still isn't something that paints the protagonists in a heroic light. (This movie also came out during the Vietnam War, and the director felt it was an anti-war statement.)
I think that the recent Suicide Squad could have learned something from The Dirty Dozen - the characters there are never really given a chance to be bad guys. In this movie, f'rex, we learn what the characters (the leads, anyway) did to earn their sentences. Some of them are kind of sympathetic - Posey (Walker) was provoked and accidentally killed a dude, while Jefferson (Brown) fought back against a hate crime and wound up sentenced to death. Meanwhile, Franco (Cassevetes) is a gangland thug who couldn't keep himself from mugging people and Maggott (Savalas) is a religious fanatic misogynist who screws everything up by going apeshit and shooting at his teammates, which is a far from from the characters in Suicide Squad deciding they're "family".
Anyway, it's funny in places, sad in others, brutal in others, and is made in the same way as a "heroic Americans" WWII movie, but doesn't shy away from the fact that soldiers, like, kill people (although Lee Marvin, who actually did serve in WWII, apparently was pretty down on how unrealistic this movie was, so I ain't saying it's true to life or anything).
My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: The Last Unicorn
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