The Dirty Dozen (67, Robert Aldrich)

The Dirty Dozen's a narrative of many faces. First and foremost, it's the archetypical men on a mission narrative. Almost every film culture has produced their own version of this story (Eastern Condors, Inglorious Bastards (the Castellari one, of course), etc.). The film also has the largest conglomeration of badasses ever to grace the screen simultaneously. Lee Marvin, Charles Bronsan, John Cassavetes, Jim Brown, Telly Savalas, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Donald Sutherland, and even lesser known personalities like Ben Carruthers and Mancini all put in poppy yet enigmatic performances. Somehow, these actors manage to infuse the personality necessary to slog through what's really quite an unbalanced narrative. From a structural perspective, the film really doesn't have a lot going for it. I don't think it's going too far to say that the film owes its fame more to its cast than even to its wonderfully capable director. That's not to slag Robert Aldrich's direction. He handles action like few directors can, and his person-object two shots frequently cast visual light on the actors' work with the characters. But what I think the most commendable thing is about The Dirty Dozen is that while it functions fine as a narrative of wartime brotherhood that I watched with my Dad as a kid, the film also inflects its narrative structure with incredibly subversive moments of leftist (often radical) politic. From the opening condemnation of capital punishment to Jim Brown's wonderful emotional turmoil as his cohorts dump gasoline and grenades into a German bunker containing their targets and their girls, the film pushes at its stolid narrative structure with an outstanding uncertainty of this history that's quite innovative, especially considering the easy slip of thinking of World War II as the good one (look at the portrayals of WWII in films as recent as Saving Private Ryan for the morally complacent version). The film dares to say that, left to a fair fight, the oppressed black man would beat the hell out of the racist asshole who doesn't want to serve with him. With Savalas' twisted performance, the film completely apes but manages to honor Night of the Hunter by suggesting that war turns even the honorable dozen into a bunch of Maggots via their firebombing of innocent women (granted, their repressed sexual urges have little to do with it). Hell, by the end of the film, the Bronsan character proposes that now the dozen might be better to go after its own commanding officers now that the mission is over. The Spirit of '68 finds an early collaborator here, as the founding father of American independent cinema meets a star cut of its own cloth. The film's and the dozen's maverick patriarch, Mr. Marvin, comes to find that a lot of good can be made by forging an alliance with those who work completely outside the system's boundaries.