9/10
Official trailer
I’ve watched The Devil’s Brigade six times. It’s one of my favorite films and the only thing keeping it from a 10 is the one reason I’ll explain in the verdict. The film tells the true story of the First Special Service Force, a joint American-Canadian commando unit assembled in 1942 to fight in Norway. The Norway mission gets canceled. The unit gets thrown at Italy instead.
They end up earning the nickname “The Black Devils” from the Germans they terrorize, and that name carries through to the title of the film. The Devil’s Brigade is the underrated cousin of The Dirty Dozen, released a year later in 1968 to less fanfare but, in my view, better material.
The story is true. The characters are based on real soldiers. The arc from mutual contempt to brotherhood is among the most carefully built in 1960s war cinema.
The 9 reflects what six viewings have confirmed. The cast is excellent. The script knows what it’s doing.
The character work is detailed in ways most war films don’t bother with. The combat sequences are competent without being showy. The film holds at 9 because every time I watch it I notice another small touch I missed before: a line reading, a glance between two characters, a piece of business in the background of a training scene. That’s the test of a 9.
The film keeps offering something on rewatch, and after six viewings the offering hasn’t slowed down.
The Setup
Lieutenant Colonel Robert T. Frederick is given command of a unit that doesn’t yet exist.
The Americans will provide the enlisted men. The Canadians will provide a contingent of their own. The combined force is intended for a winter mission in Norway, attacking heavy water facilities and other industrial targets that would slow the German war effort. The Americans send Frederick whatever they couldn’t place elsewhere: criminals, drunks, malcontents, and men whose records suggest they should have been court-martialed years ago.
The Canadians send a polished, well-trained unit of regulars and NCOs who have been training together for months.
The two groups arrive at the same base camp.
The Canadians are appalled. The Americans are belligerent. Frederick has to forge a unit out of two groups that initially despise each other and then convince his superiors that the unit is worth deploying. The brass cancels the Norway mission while they’re still training, then decides to disband the Force. Frederick fights to keep them together and gets them assigned to Italy instead. The rest of the film is what they do once they get there.
The Cast
William Holden plays Lieutenant Colonel Frederick. Holden was fifty when this film was shot and brings to Frederick the authority of an actor who had been playing officers and leaders for decades. He plays Frederick as a man who knows his men are unfit on paper and trusts them anyway. The performance is restrained, often quiet, and rests on the kind of weariness only a star at Holden’s level could deliver without it reading as boredom.
He’s the calm center of every scene he’s in, and the film is built around the trust the audience extends to him.
Cliff Robertson plays Major Alan Crown, the senior Canadian officer. Robertson had just won the Oscar for Charly when this film released, and he brings to Crown a bristling propriety. Crown is angry that his polished unit has been merged with what he sees as American garbage.
He’s angrier still that he has to share command authority with Frederick instead of holding his own command. The performance drives the entire US-Canadian friction. Robertson makes Crown’s resentment legitimate, and that lets the eventual reconciliation feel earned instead of imposed.
Robertson is my favorite thing in the picture. He plays Crown so stiff and so wounded that I spend the first hour wanting to smack him, and then the film makes me understand every one of his complaints. That turnaround is the performance, and I think it’s the reason the brotherhood at the end feels paid for.
Vince Edwards plays Major Cliff Bricker, Frederick’s American second-in-command. Edwards was best known for the television series Ben Casey and brings to Bricker the same physical authority he carried in that role. Bricker is the bridge between Frederick’s strategic command and the enlisted men’s daily reality. He’s the officer who knows which of his men is a thief and which is a drunk and which is a brawler, and he uses that knowledge to assign tasks accordingly. The performance is among the most underrated in the film.
Andrew Prine plays Private Theodore Ransom, the bookish American who has been pushed into the Force by superiors who couldn’t figure out what to do with him.
Ransom is the audience surrogate, the educated outsider who narrates parts of the experience through reactions instead of voiceover. Prine plays him as quiet and observant. That lets the more colorful characters around him tone more clearly by contrast.
Claude Akins plays Rocky Rockman, one of the more dangerous Americans.
Akins specialized in heavies throughout his career and Rockman is exactly the kind of role he could play in his sleep. The performance isn’t subtle. It doesn’t need to be. Rockman is the character who has to register as dangerous within thirty seconds of screen time, and Akins delivers.
Jack Watson plays Sergeant Major Peter Yates, the British Sergeant Major assigned to train the unit. Watson was a fixture of British war films and brings to Yates the contempt of a professional non-commissioned officer who has been handed material he considers beneath him. The performance is one of the small pleasures of the film. Watson makes every line of contempt feel justified.
Richard Jaeckel plays Corporal Wilfred Peacock, one of the Canadian junior NCOs. Jaeckel had been doing war films since the late 1940s and Peacock is one of his quieter roles. He’s the Canadian who first crosses the line into real friendship with the Americans. It makes him a structural keystone.
Jeremy Slate plays Private Hubert Hixon, one of the rougher American enlisted men.
Patric Knowles plays the British general who keeps trying to disband the Force. Dana Andrews shows up for a single scene as an American general and gives the film one of its most important pieces of authoritative casting in three minutes of screen time. Carroll O’Connor plays a smaller role two years before All in the Family made him a household name.
The Bar Fight
The scene that does the most structural work in the film.
The Americans and Canadians have been antagonizing each other in camp for weeks. The unit is on liberty in a nearby logging town. The Americans walk into a bar. The Canadians are already there. Insults are exchanged. A brawl starts between the two groups. The local lumberjacks, watching the soldiers fight each other, get involved and try to throw all of them out.
The Americans and Canadians, finding themselves outnumbered by civilians, stop fighting each other and start fighting the lumberjacks together. They win. They walk out of the wrecked bar arm in arm, the first time the two groups have done anything as a unit.
Structurally, the scene is perfect. It identifies the obstacle (mutual contempt), introduces a larger threat (the lumberjacks), and uses the larger threat to force the two groups to act together. The act-together moment is the foundation of every later piece of unit cohesion in the film. The brawl builds the friendship in the way no amount of talking heads or training montage could.
The film knows what it’s doing and the staging of the fight makes it clear: the camera shows individual Americans and Canadians helping each other up off the floor, the kind of small physical kindness that says more than dialogue could.
I grin through this whole scene. A brawl in a logging-town bar is about the oldest trick in the war-movie book, and the film gets away with it because the lumberjacks are the punchline and the arm-in-arm exit is the payoff. I’d put this bar fight up against any in the genre.
For Writers
If you’re writing an enemies-to-allies arc, study this bar fight. The film doesn’t resolve the conflict between Americans and Canadians by giving them a heart-to-heart. It doesn’t have them realize they have something in common. It introduces a larger external threat that forces them to defend each other, and the act of defending creates the bond.
People bond over shared experience faster than they bond over shared values, and the strongest shared experience is the one where you had to save the other person’s life or have your life saved by them. If your characters need to move from antagonism to alliance, find the larger threat that forces the alliance to happen physically. Then trust the physical action to create the emotional shift. The dialogue can come later. The body remembers what it did. The body remembers who was at its back. That’s the bond.
Everything else is paperwork.
The Taking Of The Town
The other scene that’s stayed with me through every viewing.
Once the Force deploys to Italy, Frederick is given a target: an Italian town occupied by Germans. The brass expects a standard assault with full casualties. Frederick decides to do something else. He sends a small reconnaissance team in at night to scout. They find the town lightly defended, the Germans confident that no one would be coming up the mountain road they didn’t bother to guard.
Frederick orders the entire Force to climb the mountain in silence, in darkness, in winter. They reach the town before dawn. They take it without firing more than a handful of shots because they’re already inside the German perimeter before the Germans know they’re there.
It’s shot with the kind of restraint that makes the audacity feel earned instead of showy. There’s no swelling score. There’s no slow-motion. The Force moves through the town like a well-trained machine. The Germans wake up to find Americans and Canadians in their rooms with weapons drawn.
The brass who had predicted heavy losses are forced to revise their estimation of what the unit can do. The mission becomes the proof of concept that gets the Force its further assignments.
The reason the scene works is that the film has spent the previous hour establishing the unit’s competence. The audience has watched these men train and learn to climb. It has watched Frederick build their confidence and discipline. When the climb up the mountain happens, the audience already believes the unit can do it. The film doesn’t have to oversell the moment. The buildup has already done the selling.
Mount La Difensa
The combat centerpiece. The Force is assigned to take Mount la Difensa, a heavily defended German position that conventional forces have been unable to break. The mountain is a vertical cliff face with German pillboxes at the top. The Force is going to climb the cliff at night in winter and assault the position from a direction the Germans believe is impossible.
The sequence is the film’s most extended combat set piece and it’s structurally the climax.
The climb is dangerous. The assault, once they reach the top, is brutal. Many of the characters the audience has come to know are killed. The film doesn’t soften the losses. It doesn’t arrange the deaths for emotional crescendo. It lets them happen the way deaths in combat happen: suddenly, often without ceremony, sometimes to the wrong person. The Force takes the mountain. It costs them.
The sequence works because the film has invested in every life it spends.
The Force has been together long enough that the audience knows who’s dying. The character work in the first two acts pays off in the casualty list. By the end of Mount la Difensa, the unit that was barely a unit at the start of the film has become something larger than the sum of its parts, and the cost of becoming that thing is laid out on the mountain in dead bodies that the camera doesn’t look away from.
This is the stretch that hurts. I get attached to these men in the camp scenes, and the film makes me pay for it on that cliff with deaths that come quick and ugly and don’t wait for a swell of music. I think that refusal to stage a pretty death is what sets this film apart from the sixties war pictures that treated combat like a stunt show.
The Writing
The screenplay was credited to William Roberts and is based on Robert H. Adleman and Colonel George Walton’s nonfiction book about the actual First Special Service Force.
The script’s specific strength is restraint. The film resists the urge to make any character a hero in the conventional sense. Frederick is competent instead of inspired. Crown is professional instead of charismatic. The enlisted men are flawed in ways the film doesn’t paper over.
The dialogue is functional instead of quotable, the right choice for a film about soldiers who would have considered quotability suspicious.
The structural discipline shows up in the pacing.
The film spends its first hour on the unit’s formation, training, and internal conflict. It spends its second hour on operations in Italy. The transition is clean. The character work in the first hour pays off in the second hour. The audience knows every man on the mountain by the time the mountain happens. The film doesn’t waste its setup.
The Direction
Andrew V. McLaglen directed. He was the son of Victor McLaglen, an Oscar winner who had been part of John Ford’s stock company, and he’d absorbed his father’s craft from the inside. McLaglen specialized in westerns and action films and brought to The Devil’s Brigade the kind of unfussy professional competence that the material needed. He doesn’t show off. He doesn’t use the camera to draw attention to itself. He lets the cast and the script do their jobs and stays out of the way.
That sounds like faint praise, and it’s the opposite. A director who knew what not to do made the film better.
What Keeps It From A 10
The Mount la Difensa sequence is the film’s climax, but the film doesn’t quite know how to end after it.
The final fifteen minutes feel like the film is trying to find a graceful exit and not quite landing it. There’s a scene of remembrance. There’s a scene of the survivors. There’s a scene of Frederick walking away. None of these is wrong. None of them is as strong as the moments that preceded them. A great war film knows how to land its ending.
The Devil’s Brigade doesn’t quite stick the landing, and that costs it the tenth point.
The other small issue is that the film occasionally tips into sentimentality in a way that the rest of it has the discipline to resist. The film mostly handles the reconciliation scenes between Americans and Canadians with restraint. It handles a few of them with a heavier touch than the rest of the film deserves.
These are small complaints. They’re also the kinds of complaints that show up on the sixth viewing instead of the first.
Does The Devil’s Brigade still hold up?
A 9, and a 10 would not have been wrong.
The Devil’s Brigade came out to less fanfare than The Dirty Dozen, and I think that’s a damn shame, because this is the better film. The cast is excellent, the script is disciplined, the combat is restrained, and every bit of character work from the first hour pays off on that mountain. The limp last fifteen minutes are the only thing standing between it and the top score.
I’ll watch it again. The bar fight will still work. The taking of the town will still work. The climb up Mount la Difensa will still gut me. The ending will still feel slightly underwhelming compared to what came before. The 9 is the right rating, and the reason it’s not a 10 is small enough that I forget it between viewings and have to rediscover it each time. That’s the test of a 9. The film is great. It’s not perfect. The greatness is what stays with me.
