The Dirty Dozen (1967) Review

Official trailer

I didn’t finish The Dirty Dozen. I enjoyed the first half. I started losing interest somewhere in the middle. I stopped watching before the climax. I don’t know how it ends. The 5 reflects an honest accounting of that experience: a film with enough going for it to keep me watching for the first hour, not enough to keep me watching for the second, and one anachronistic line of dialogue that threw me out of the movie hard enough that I never fully recovered.

The Dirty Dozen and The Devil’s Brigade share the misfit-soldiers-as-elite-unit structure. The Dirty Dozen came out a year earlier, in 1967, to massive box office success, and it’s the one everybody knows. After sitting through both, I don’t think it’s the better film. This is going to be a different kind of review because the experience was different. I can’t tell you what the climax does. I can tell you why I never got there.

The Setup

The brass gives Major John Reisman an impossible assignment: take twelve convicted soldiers (men sentenced to death or long prison terms for murder, rape, and other capital offenses) and turn them into an elite commando unit.

The mission is to parachute behind German lines and assassinate German officers vacationing at a French chateau. The men are told that if they survive the mission, their sentences will be reviewed favorably. They’re not promised pardons. They’re promised a chance.

The premise is darker than The Devil’s Brigade.

The Devil’s Brigade was about misfits who were difficult but not criminals. The Dirty Dozen is about criminals who were convicted of serious offenses. The moral structure is therefore murkier from the start. The film knows this and embraces it. Reisman is training expendable killers. The mission itself, which involves burning Germans alive in a basement, is a war crime by any reasonable standard. The film is conscious of this but doesn’t entirely judge it.

The Cast

That’s the strongest element. Lee Marvin plays Reisman as a man who has seen enough of the army’s bureaucratic absurdity to enjoy being given a unit he doesn’t have to pretend is respectable. Marvin’s natural authority carries every scene he’s in, and the film leans on that authority properly.

Ernest Borgnine plays General Worden, the officer who assigns the mission.

Borgnine and Marvin had history going back to Bad Day at Black Rock, and the two of them play their scenes with the comfort of actors who know each other’s rhythms. Charles Bronson plays Joseph Wladislaw, the most level-headed of the convicts. John Cassavetes plays Victor Franko and got an Oscar nomination for it, which the performance earns.

Telly Savalas plays Archer Maggott, the religious psychopath, and brings to the role the kind of unhinged intensity that he’d later use to carry Kojak in a very different tone. Donald Sutherland plays Vernon Pinkley, the dim-witted convict, in one of his earliest significant film roles. Jim Brown plays Robert Jefferson in his second film, fresh off his career as one of the NFL’s greatest running backs.

Clint Walker plays Samson Posey. Trini Lopez plays Pedro Jiminez (Lopez was a pop singer who left the production over a contract dispute, so his character is killed off relatively early). Richard Jaeckel plays Sergeant Bowren. George Kennedy plays Major Armbruster. Robert Ryan plays Colonel Breed, Reisman’s rival officer. Ralph Meeker plays the psychologist assigned to evaluate the unit.

It’s a serious cast. The film knows it’s assembled a serious cast and gives most of them at least one moment to register. The Cassavetes performance is one of the film’s strongest elements, and the Sutherland scene where Pinkley impersonates a general during an inspection (“Very pretty, colonel, very pretty. But can they fight?”) is a small comic masterpiece that the film deserves credit for.

Cassavetes is the reason I stayed as long as I did. Franko is sullen, sly and dangerous in the same breath, and the movie wakes up whenever he’s in the frame. I’d happily have watched a whole film of him and Marvin circling each other, and I think the picture would have been tighter for it.

The Word “Groovy”

I can’t get past this moment. A young Donald Sutherland, playing Private Vernon Pinkley, uses the word “groovy” in dialogue. The film is set during World War II. American soldiers in 1944 didn’t say “groovy.” The word started as swing-era jazz slang, and the mid-1960s hippie counterculture made it mainstream. A WWII GI would have said “swell” or “keen” or “the cat’s pajamas” or any of a dozen other period-suitable options. He wouldn’t have said “groovy.”

The line is in the script. Sutherland delivers it. The director didn’t cut it. The editor left it in. Multiple people working on a film about American soldiers in 1944 looked at this line and decided it was fine. It’s the kind of small period violation that breaks the immersive contract a war film signs with its audience. The film is asking me to believe I’m watching soldiers in 1944. The dialogue keeps telling me I’m watching 1967.

Critics don’t widely cite the “groovy” line in their reviews of The Dirty Dozen. Most contemporary critics focused on the film’s violence instead of its dialogue. But multiple critics have noted the wider problem with Pinkley as a character. The character feels less anchored to 1944 than the other members of the unit.

Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com has observed that the war-games sequence prefigured M*A*S*H, and that Sutherland was cast in M*A*S*H because Robert Altman enjoyed Pinkley’s general-impersonation scene. Other critics have described Pinkley as an early draft of Captain Hawkeye Pierce, the explicitly counterculture-era character Sutherland would play three years later. The Pinkley-as-proto-Hawkeye reading is a diagnosis of the same problem I noticed when I heard “groovy” come out of his mouth.

The reason Pinkley feels so untethered from 1944 turns out to be partly accidental. Sutherland originally had one line of dialogue in the script: “Number two, sir!” The general-impersonation scene was originally written for Clint Walker as Samson Posey, who refused it on the grounds that he found the scene demeaning to his Native American character. Director Robert Aldrich pointed at Sutherland on set and gave him the bit on the spot. After Sutherland nailed it, Aldrich kept inventing new scene-stealing moments for the unknown Canadian actor.

The Pinkley we see in the finished film is therefore largely improvised business built around Sutherland’s natural tone. That tone, in 1967, was already drifting toward the hippie-adjacent comic mode Sutherland would inhabit fully in M*A*S*H and Kelly’s Heroes. In Kelly’s Heroes, released in 1970, Sutherland played Oddball, an openly anachronistic hippie soldier dropped into a WWII tank crew. The character is deliberately out of period. Pinkley is accidentally out of period. The same actor, three years later, played the deliberate version of what Pinkley accidentally became.

The “groovy” line is one instance of a broader problem: Pinkley as a character was built around a 1967 actor’s instincts instead of a 1944 soldier’s vocabulary, and the cracks show. That critics have been noting the proto-Hawkeye quality of Pinkley for decades, without calling out the “groovy” line, suggests the line is the small visible symptom of a larger structural issue instead of an isolated error. The film let Sutherland improvise his way into a 1960s character because the improvisation was funny.

I laughed at the improvisation, and I’d still have cut the word. A good joke delivered in the wrong decade costs a war movie more than it earns, and this one cost me my trust in everything that came after it.

What makes the moment especially painful is that Sutherland is otherwise excellent in this film.

The inspection scene where Pinkley impersonates a general is among the most quoted moments in war comedy. Sutherland was thirty-one when this film was shot, and The Dirty Dozen was the role that launched his career toward M*A*S*H, Klute, and everything that followed. He’s good in the part. The line isn’t his fault.

The line is the writer’s fault and the director’s fault and the editor’s fault, and Sutherland is the one stuck delivering it. But the word lands in his mouth, in a film about 1944, and the moment can’t be unheard.

I noticed it. I couldn’t unnotice it. Every later piece of dialogue had to fight through the suspicion that the writers weren’t paying attention to the period they were supposedly recreating. The suspicion compounded across the runtime. By the time the film moved into its training sequences, I was no longer trusting the film to know what year it was in.

Why It Became Boring

I lost interest in the middle of the film.

The training sequences run long. The internal conflicts between the convicts are repetitive. Maggott’s escalating religious mania becomes predictable once the audience figures out where it’s going. The film establishes the Reisman-Breed rivalry and then keeps establishing it without progressing. The mock-mission exercise where the Dozen humiliates Breed’s regular unit is fun the first time and not as fun the second time the film leans on the same dynamic.

The film is two hours and thirty minutes long. The Devil’s Brigade is two hours and ten minutes. The extra twenty minutes in The Dirty Dozen show up in the middle, and the middle is where the film can’t quite sustain its momentum.

By the time the mission preparation began, I had been watching for what felt like a much longer film than I’d signed up for, and I checked out. I don’t remember the specific scene where I stopped paying attention.

What I remember is the slow sag of caring less about every one of these men, and it counts against the film. A cast this good deserves a movie that keeps moving, and Aldrich let them mill around the training camp until I stopped wondering which of them would make it to the chateau.

What Works

The film is mediocre. That’s harder to write about than bad. The cast is excellent. The premise is strong. The dark moral structure is more sophisticated than most 1960s war films attempted. The Cassavetes performance is the kind of work that holds up across multiple viewings if you make it to multiple viewings. The Sutherland inspection scene is funny. The Marvin-Borgnine chemistry pays off every time they share a scene.

If you watch the first hour and turn it off, you’ll have seen the parts of the film that work best. If you keep going, your mileage will vary. Many people love this film. It grossed about forty-five million dollars on a budget of about five million. It was the highest-grossing film of 1967. The audience that found it then has stayed loyal to it for almost sixty years. I’m not in that audience.

The audience that exists is real, and their love for the film is legitimate. All I can report is my own experience, and mine was a strong first hour followed by a long, slow fade.

The Devil’s Brigade Comparison

In 1967, The Dirty Dozen released. The Devil’s Brigade released in 1968. The two films share enough structural DNA that the comparison is unavoidable. I covered some of this in my Devil’s Brigade review, and the conclusion hasn’t changed across the additional viewings of The Dirty Dozen that I attempted: The Devil’s Brigade is the better film. The reasons are specific. The Devil’s Brigade is based on a true story instead of a fictional one. That gives the stakes a different weight.

The Devil’s Brigade builds its enemies-to-allies arc more carefully through the bar fight and later training scenes.

The Devil’s Brigade respects the period in a way The Dirty Dozen doesn’t (no anachronistic slang that I noticed across six viewings). It also has a lower body count of major characters at the climax. That means the deaths matter more. The Devil’s Brigade is twenty minutes shorter and uses every minute of its runtime productively.

Commercially, The Dirty Dozen was the bigger success. The Devil’s Brigade was the better film. These aren’t the same metric. Both can be true, and they are.

The Director

Robert Aldrich directed. Aldrich had a strong career: Kiss Me Deadly, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, The Longest Yard, and others. He was a skilled craftsman who knew how to manage a large ensemble. The Dirty Dozen is one of his most successful films commercially and one of his most uneven creatively. The pacing problems in the middle are partially Aldrich’s responsibility. The film could have been thirty minutes shorter and stronger for it. Aldrich wasn’t the kind of director to trim aggressively, and the film shows the consequences.

Is The Dirty Dozen worth watching?

A 5. The film is mediocre on rewatch, mediocre on first watch, and mediocre as a piece of war cinema judged against its peers. The cast is the reason it’s not lower. The period violations and the bloated middle are the reasons it’s not higher. I didn’t finish watching it. I don’t know how it ends. I’m told the ending involves the assault on the chateau and the burning of Germans in a cellar.

I’ve read enough about the film to know the general shape of the climax. I don’t have the right to evaluate that climax because I didn’t sit through the rest of the film to get there.

If you want to watch a misfit-unit war film, watch The Devil’s Brigade. If you want to watch a Lee Marvin performance, watch Point Blank, also from 1967, the better Marvin vehicle by a wide margin. If you want to watch The Dirty Dozen, you may end up loving it the way many people do. I didn’t.

So it ends up at a 5, dead in the middle of my scale, and I think that’s the fair number. Marvin, Cassavetes and the inspection scene keep it out of the bottom half, and the bloated middle plus one lazy word of 1967 slang keep it well away from the top. I’m annoyed about that, because the first hour promised me a much better movie than the one I stopped watching.

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