The Dirty Dozen details
Movie Details:
- Director: Robert Aldrich
- Produced By: MGM
- Year: 1967
- Run Time: 149 minutes
- Country: UK, USA
- Language: English
- Category: Feature
- Genre/Type: War
- Filmed In: Color
- Key Cast: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, George Kennedy, Richard Jaeckel, Robert Ryan, Full Credits
- Awards: Best Director (Directors Guild of America 1967), Best Editing (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scie 1967), Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Pic (Hollywood Foreign Press Association 1967), Full Awards
Director Robert Aldrich took what he considered a hopelessly old-fashioned script by Lukas Heller and Nunnally Johnson and fashioned The Dirty Dozen into one of MGM's biggest moneymakers of the 1960s--and the sixth highest-grossing film in the studio's history. Lee Marvin plays Major Reisman, assigned to coordinate a suicide mission on a French chateau held by top Nazi officers. Since no "normal" GI can be expected to volunteer for this mission, Reisman is compelled to draw his personnel from a group of military prisoners serving life sentences. This "dirty dozen" includes a sex pervert (Telly Savalas), a psycho (John Cassavetes), a retarded killer (Donald Sutherland), and the equally malevolent Charles Bronson, Trini Lopez, Jim Brown, and Clint Walker. On the dim promise of receiving pardons if they survive, the criminals undergo a brutal training program, then are marched behind enemy lines dressed as Nazi soldiers, the better to overtake the chateau and kill everyone in it--including the innocent wives and mistresses of the German officers. by Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Keywords:
- group
- major
- suicide-mission
- machismo
- war
- training
- Nazi
Themes:
- Military Life
- Behind Enemy Lines
- Heroic Mission
