When I originally started to write about Robert Aldrich in the early days of this blog, I formulated a list of some of Aldrich's main themes and recurring story elements. Aldrich was a true auteur in so far as his private universe is distinctive and consistent across the entire body of his work. Aldrich had contempt for authority, a deep hatred of Hollywood myth-making, and a preference for protagonists who are individualists caught in a suffocating system. I also had the idea--maybe the main idea when I look at his films--that he made Gothics, and not just the pair of psychobiddy films he made in the early 1960s. One of the key films in my thinking is The Dirty Dozen (1967). On the surface it doesn't seem much like a Gothic film. It's a classic "men on a mission" film--at this point half a century later it's probably THE classic "men on a mission" film--which seems far removed from brooding castles and ghosts and madwomen in attics. But let's look at some of the elements of the Gothic: sublimated sexual derangement, confinement as a microcosm where personalities and psychological forces collide, a sense of encroaching doom, characters haunted by past crimes, a big house that is a character unto itself. Many Gothics--maybe even most of them--are psychoanalytic in nature. If we look closely at the elements of The Dirty Dozen, most of these hallmarks are actually there, including the psychoanalytic nature. This is the frame into which Aldrich slips his own private obsessions. The Dirty Dozen is one of the key works on his resume. Even if it hadn't been a gargantuan hit, it would be an important film. It was a gargantuan hit, though. It was the highest grossing film of 1967. Its success enabled Aldrich to form his own production company in order to keep working on more personal projects, at least until he found another gargantuan hit. It took him a while to find that next hit, and he went through The Dirty Dozen's capital--both social and commercial--in due course. But that, as they say, is another story.
The Dirty Dozen finds insubordinate Major Reisman summoned to watch a hanging. After the hanging, he's brought before General Worden, his superior, and informed that he has a new mission: he's to gather a group of soldiers convicted of capital crimes who have either a death sentence or a long, long prison sentence ahead of them and train them to for an operation behind enemy lines that is likely a suicide mission. He has twelve men whose crimes include murder and rape. One of his men is a former officer who shot his superior officer because of dangerous incompetence. One is a black man who killed the white men who tried to castrate him. One is a religious fanatic who views himself as the scourge of god, particularly toward women. Another is a Chicago hood who killed a man in a petty robbery. And down the line...They are all of them undisciplined and contemptuous of their mission and of the military itself, whose only interest is in the pardon that awaits them beyond their mission. Assuming they survive.
To hear them tell it, most of the principles didn't much respect The Dirty Dozen. Lee Marvin thought it was slop for an audience of imbeciles. Charles Bronson thought it was too violent and walked out of the premier half-way through the film. Aldrich himself didn't think much of it while he was making it, but changed his tune when the box office receipts started pouring in. And there is certainly a LOT to criticize about the film. Most of its lead actors are too old for their parts. Some of the performances--particularly Telly Savalas's sex maniac--are broad to the point of parody. If one possesses a conservative, "thank you for your service" view of the military, its depiction of American soldiers during World War II committing what amount to war crimes has to sting. WW II was the "Good" war where Americans are unambiguously the good guys, wasn't it? How dare they? But that's Aldrich for you. He was never a careful craftsman and his symbols were often the blunt instruments of his ideology. His criticism of the American military's conduct in World War II wasn't new to this film. His previous war film, Attack, is equally withering, as is his subsequent Too Late The Hero. He is certainly channeling then-current unease about American adventurism in Vietnam, which surely appealed to the anti-war left of its day, but more to the point, he was criticizing war itself. It's an obscenity, Aldrich was saying, and war films should be obscene no matter the war.
It's not just the war, though. There's a vein of anti-racism running through The Dirty Dozen thanks to the presence of Jim Brown in the cast, whose part was greatly expanded when Brown came on board the project. Aldrich, as he was wont to do throughout his career, used Brown as a blunt object. The first instance of this occurs during the scenes when Reisman interrogates the individual convicts under his command. "Maybe you think I should have let those cracker bastards castrate me?" Brown's Jefferson asks. This establishes Brown both as an avatar of Black Manhood under threat by the systemic racism of America and as a man wrongly convicted. Aldrich was absolutely interested in systemic oppressions of all sorts, by the way; his films were always about individuals railing against the system. The system was always always always the villain in his films. As a character whose criminal past is slanted toward the heroic, or at the very least self defense, Jefferson as an anti-hero. For his troubles, some early reviews of the film suggested that Jefferson was "white hating," as if a man threatened with castration owes whites any deference at all. If anything, he doesn't have enough hatred of whites. In any event, the second scene critiquing American racism is the gymnasium scene when Maggott, in his most polite southern accent, asks, "Suh! Do we have to eat with n****rs?" The end of the film gives Jefferson a suitably heroic death, while reserving a different fate for Maggott.
Maggott is another interrogation of the ugliness roiling beneath the veneer of America's heroic image of itself. The scenes with Jefferson establish him as a racist. Other scenes establish him as a religious fanatic, whose zeal is both the cause and/or excuse he uses for his prejudices. Maggott is a figure who still resonates in 2022 given the horrors that people like him are currently unleashing on the American body politics. He's both the true believer who imposes his religion on others and the incel whose misogyny causes him to murder women. Savalas plays this type in broad strokes, perhaps as a means of signaling that the actor himself does not believe as his character believes, or perhaps because Aldrich intends him as a lampoon--a dark lampoon in the end. Even the name of the character suggests revulsion and smallness in equal measure. He's a parasite on the American experience. His psycho-sexual derangement is what sends the mission awry in the end and Aldrich probably intends this as prediction for America generally should it not cut out this particular political sickness. If so, he wasn't wrong.
Each of the other featured convicts in turn represent some idea beyond their functions as characters: Bronson's Wladislav is an honorable soldier in a dishonorable military complex. Clint Walker's Posey is arguably a representative of America itself, well meaning but dim and unaware of either its own strength or its potential for violence. John Cassavetes's Franko is poke in the eye to the notion that career criminals are irredeemable. Donald Sutherland is the naivete of youth in the face of actual violence. And so on. In truth, half of the dozen are relatively faceless and one of them, Trini Lopez's Jimenez, fell victim to the actor's demands for more money and more screen time; in retaliation, Aldrich instead bumps him off off-screen and doesn't even provide him a heroic death. But that's part of the film, too, I guess. The mechanism Aldrich uses to interrogate all of these themes is two-fold: first, he interviews the characters, who at this point are defined by the recitation of their crimes under the opening credits. This is the psychoanalytic part of the film, in which the talking cure is offered up as Reisman hears the stories important to the narrative and the details of the crimes that haunt his convicts. The second puts them into a crucible to watch how they act. This, too, is psychoanalytic, as its watches the behavior of men rather than listening to their rationalizations on the therapist's couch, as it were. Here, Reisman is not beyond the film's gaze. We aren't told why Reisman is in the doghouse with his superiors, or the source of his enmity with Colonel Breed, but we can make some guesses based on the actions of his character. The army has its discipline, and Reisman has ideas that contradict them. He gives his men self-determination within the system hoping they'll cohere for the greater good. He doesn't believe in breaking men and turning them into automatons. Breed does. Hence, Reisman is a humanist; Breed is a martinet. The Army does like its martinets. In another era, Breed might have been akin to the monstrous General Mireau in Paths of Glory. He's plenty monstrous as it is.
But maybe it's not that cut and dried. There's a stark contrast between the war games in which Reisman's men are tasked with capturing Breed's command, and the real mission, in which they are asked to massacre as many German officers as they can. The war games, played with rules the convicts gleefully disregard, are played for comedic effect, with Reisman's superiors observing with tacit approval. The mission is a clear violation of the Geneva convention's rules, and this is played for horror. Same actions, different context. There's a moral point being made here, that war itself is a crime and the definitions of who is a criminal is capricious. This moral point trickles down to the convicts themselves. Their crimes are erased if their further crimes serve the system? That's the paradox of violence perpetrated on behalf of The State. The recitation of the men who died over the closing credits has always stuck in my mind as being over the top into sentimentality, but when I watched the film for this review, I found it obscenely ironic. The ending that precedes it is bitterly ironic, too, in which Reisman and his surviving team--only Wladislaw and Sgt. Bowren--have the promise of another mission as their reward.
For a film as subversive as this one, it plays pretty well to viewers across the political spectrum. Its initial audience may have been the anti-war left, but over time it became one of the essential "dad" movies. I know I first saw it on a Saturday afternoon with my dad, who was as far from an aging hippie as you can possibly imagine. He was a career Air Force man who was in Thailand when the film was released. The film has received a lot of criticism over the years for the age of its actors--over blown, I think, given that Donald Sutherland, Trini Lopez, Jim Brown, and Stuart Cooper were all relatively young at the time--but that's part of what turned it into a dad movie in the first place. It's a wish fantasy for middle-aged men, the kind of men's magazine adventure story that strokes an aging masculine ego. This is almost entirely beside the intentions of its principle creators, who doubtless cast the film with an eye toward bankability, but the effect is there. And this isn't the only film in this mode. This cast is substantially made up of the stock mid-century tough guy actors. Many of them had worked together before in films like Bad Day at Black Rock (Marvin, Ryan, Borgnine), and The Professionals (Marvin, Ryan), and would appear together again in films like The Wild Bunch (Ryan, Borgnine), Kelly's Heroes (Sutherland, Savalas), and The Emperor of the North Pole (Marvin, Borgnine). Moreover, Aldrich worked with these actors multiple times. Ralph Meeker was in Kiss Me Deadly, Lee Marvin was in Attack! and would return for The Emperor of the North Pole with Borgnine. It's surprising that Aldrich didn't have parts for Burt Lancaster or Jack Palance, though a role was offered to Palance. My point here is that this film is part of a continuum of mid-century action films, and these actors are the face of those films. Aldrich certainly knew this. One of the key elements of his brand of cinema was using these actors--many of whom shared his politics--to smuggle his themes in front of a conservative viewership. It mostly worked, though whether it actually affected those viewers is debatable given the subsequent political history of America.
The influence of the film on pop culture is undeniable, though. Writers Jon Ostrander and Kim Yale copied the idea behind a team of convicts assembled for dangerous near suicidal missions wholesale for DC Comics's Suicide Squad (later in several films). The adjective "dirty" began to appear in other film titles as a signifier of anti-establishment action (Play Dirty starring Michael Caine; Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry with Peter Fonda and Susan George; and most famously Dirty Harry with Clint Eastwood). Aldrich himself resisted the impulse to make sequels to The Dirty Dozen, and no such film appeared until after his death. By then, both the property and star Lee Marvin had seen better days. For Aldrich himself? He chose to pursue his own imp of the perverse in films produced by his own production company. It would be seven long years before he had another hit. Whatever their merits, films like The Killing of Sister George, Too Late the Hero, and Ulzana's Raid never caught fire, though some of them have developed cult followings since their release. Aldrich had had fallow periods before. He kept at it, though, knowing that lightning would inevitably strike again.
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