Sam: (00:19)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about the film The Dirty Dozen, which came out in 1967. It was directed by Robert Aldrich with a screenplay by Nunnally Johnson and Lucas Heller. It’s based on the novel The Dirty Dozen by E.M. Nathanson, which came out in 1965. It’s the story of a fictional military unit comprised of the worst convicts the army could find, sent on a secret mission into occupied France and promised a pardon upon their return if they survive.

It won an Academy Award for best sound editing. And here with us today we have our friend Tom, who was the one who recommended this movie to us. So welcome, Tom.

Tom: Hi. A long-time listener, first-time guest, I guess.

Sam: What did you think of this movie, Maart?

Maartje: (01:02)
Boy, I have some mixed feelings about this movie. I had to pause it halfway because I got bored. I was like, I don’t want to watch this movie anymore. But then the second half was better, so I should have just let it go on. So yeah, feelings. I thought it was a little bit long in that the storytelling was kind of slow. Not a lot happens in the first half.

In the sense that all they do is train for like an hour and I was like, when are they going to get to the good part? And I just didn’t care about any of the characters. So it’s not my favourite movie and I feel like I want to say it’s a product of its time, but even then we’ve seen a lot of these. It’s just not my favourite. So I didn’t love it. I’m sorry, Tom. I wanted to really like it.

Tom: (01:52)
Did either of you see this movie before the pod?

Sam: Not me.

Maartje: (01:56)
Not me, no. It was the first time. Other people saying it was good, and I expected it to be good, I don’t know why. I just did, because everyone is saying it’s good. And it’s not like a bad movie, I just didn’t enjoy it that much.

Tom: (01:57)
Okay.

Yeah, I feel like you had to be — I think it’s like a guy movie. I think it’s one of the quintessential guy movies. So I think that might be part of it. Yeah.

Maartje: (02:19)
Could be.

I kind of missed some motivations maybe for the characters and just a reason to care about them. I cared about some of them toward the end, but not all of them.

Sam: (02:31)
It certainly feels like the kind of movie that your dad would watch on a Sunday afternoon. Like it would just be on TV kind of thing. And I think a lot of people feel really nostalgic for it because they watched it a lot as kids. And the book is, you know, the first 450 pages is them training and becoming a unit. And then the last few pages are the actual mission itself. And it took me a while to figure out what the author was doing, to stop waiting for something to happen. And once I did that, I enjoyed the book a lot more. And I think the movie tried to borrow that same format, but without any of the supporting character development. And that just made it fall kind of flat in places.

Maartje: (03:13)
You know what I really enjoyed? I really liked the war game bit. That was probably my favourite bit. It’s just them like little rascals doing what they’re supposed to be doing in a very smart way and that kind of got me excited. So I guess that’s just in the second half and then you get obviously the big mission which was also fun. But yeah. I don’t know. I could have missed it and I wouldn’t have minded not having seen it. But I don’t hate that I saw it.

Tom: (03:41)
It definitely is funny that the big thing, what everything is leading up to, is the big mission. And it is, I think, 30 minutes of the film and the film is two and a half hours long or just about. And basically they’re doing stuff from beginning to end. There’s no like 30-minute credit sequence or anything like that. The end of the movie is the mission and most of the movie is leading up to it.

Although I think as a ratio that’s still better than the book, because the mission was actually even smaller in terms of page count.

Sam:
Yeah, effectively they start the mission and then things go sideways and then the remaining entire
part of the mission is told by a mission report over a span of like five pages.

Maartje: (04:32)
Okay. Interesting. Yeah, that just doesn’t work in the movie. So they had to make the actual mission the mission. I don’t know. I’ve liked training stuff in other movies. I just thought this was kind of a long one. And I also thought it was a little bit repetitive. They get their introduction, they introduce all 12 of them. And then they kind of do it again but by their crime. Couldn’t they have done this in just a smarter, more conflated way? But maybe that’s just me, guys. I don’t want to be down on this movie. It’s not a bad movie.

Sam: (05:08)
What’s your background with this movie, Tom?

Tom:
Well, okay, so my background — I did not watch a lot of World War Two movies as a kid, but this was my World War Two movie. I grew up with two older brothers and this movie played, I think it was on the History Channel or something, and this was back when we had VHS players and you could record off of the TV.

So my World War II movie was The Dirty Dozen, which was a recorded copy off of the History Channel where the first 20 minutes didn’t get recorded because we were still figuring out how to do it. So basically, in preparation for the podcast, I had actually watched the whole movie, and that was the first time I had seen the first 20 minutes of the film. You’re like, makes so much more sense now. I got so much more context out of it now.

It was kind of my quintessential World War II movie. And so that’s why, when you guys were looking for recommendations, that was the first one that jumped up. But I think there’s a lot of this movie in a lot of other films. A lot of its DNA goes on to inspire a lot of other media, including World War II media and stuff that’s more in the action-adventure genre. Its influence is pretty potent, even if the film itself doesn’t necessarily grab everyone. There’s something in this film that sort of moves on afterwards.

Maartje: (06:27)
When did The Great Escape come out? Because it feels kind of similar.

Sam: (06:31)
It’s 1963 maybe, like it’s a very similar timeframe.

Maartje: (06:35)
Yeah, so that was the first thing I thought about when watching this one. It’s got the same kind of vibes, except I liked that one slightly more. Maybe.

Tom: (06:49)
Yeah.

I think there is another movie — Kelly’s Heroes comes out about two years later, and Kelly’s Heroes actually has Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland in it.

Maartje: (06:59)
That was recommended to me by my friend named Tim. So we have Tom for this one and then I’ll invite Tim to come and talk about Kelly’s Heroes with us.

Sam: (07:09)
Yeah.

I did read the novel that this is based on. Nathanson did not serve in World War II. He was too young. I get the sense he was one of those people who was a young teenager during the war. So one of those things where these are guys that you really look up to. I get that vibe from it for sure. The book is much more of a character study than the movie. We learn where these guys are from, what they did, from their perspective, why they did it, how they feel about the way the world has treated them. And they’re all very different from one another. They each have their own sensibilities and worldviews. And they’re not all good people, far and away not all good people, but they are all real people. And I do feel like the book tried to be honest about the racism experienced and or carried out by some of the men, for example, and the movie effectively rinses out all of that griminess.

And like we were talking about, the mission in the book is almost an afterthought because the point of the book is not the mission. The mission is representative of the culmination of all this work that asks the question, can men change? If you send a group of men on a suicide mission together, does that make them rise to something larger than themselves? And in some cases the answer is yes, and in some cases the answer is no. And in the mission report that caps off the book at the end, the military brass have decided that they will never be repeating this experiment because in their eyes it’s failed.

You know, kind of the way that these guys have developed internally, you’re like, well, I don’t think it was a total failure, because we get to see how these guys have grown and changed in some ways. And I think in the book it’s very noticeable how long it takes Reisman, the CO, to trust them and how long it takes for them to trust him and each other. It’s a work in progress right up until the end. Even right before the mission, he’s not 100% on all these guys.

And it’s a long time before they’re allowed to leave the stockade without guards, before they’re allowed to handle guns and live ammunition. And this is all part of this psychological thing where we’re learning about these guys. And this is not a heartwarming tale where all these men make good in the end. One character in the book is killed behind enemy lines because he attempts to rape a maid and she stabs him with a pair of scissors. Another character who has insisted he’s innocent the whole book stabs a Nazi’s girlfriend and has an immediate horrible flashback where he realises that he’s actually not innocent. He panics and runs out into the hall, he’s like, I did it, and he’s firing his guns off. And that’s what tips off the Germans to the fact that they’re there. So yeah, I found that the book really tried to get into the nitty-gritty of humanity in a way that the movie did not.

The movie is more interested in getting into the nitty-gritty of, wouldn’t this be really cool if it happened? It kind of is at the end, but the way the movie handles the tension of the prisoners and the CO is very interesting in that it’s somewhat present and somewhat completely glossed over. There’s no doubt by the end of the film.

Maartje: (09:37)
That makes sense.

Tom: (10:00)
About these men, they’re all on the same page and they’re all a unit. But there is a little bit of that tension of them not necessarily coming together as a whole, and it’s really concentrated in Telly Savalas’ character, Maggot. He really stands out as the only one who’s kind of not socialised by the end of the film. Everyone else is kind of a good soldier by the end of the film. Yeah. And there was really this sense in the book that I got — I used to be a teacher, and if you go in to teach high school kids, there’s a very real sense of, how real is my authority and how far does it extend? And if you make a misstep, you will lose all of these people. And that’s very much the situation Reisman finds himself in. In the book, sometimes he makes mistakes. And sometimes that puts him one step forward, two steps back with these guys, because he has to make them trust him as much as anything else.

Maartje: (10:51)
Yeah. I did both like and dislike, I guess, the relationship between Reisman and Colonel Breed, his arch-nemesis.

Sam: (11:05)
Colonel Breed is actually in charge of the paratroopers’ summer camp. So it’s kind of like the poor kids versus the rich kids. The way they know each other in the book is a little bit different. Colonel Breed, who is Reisman’s arch-nemesis, they know each other because when Reisman was on a previous undercover mission — he’s part of the OSS — he was in Italy on an undercover mission and he needs help from the army in some way. He needs a Jeep, he needs fuel, whatever. So he goes to Colonel Breed and he’s like, hey, I’m an American, I’m undercover, can I have this stuff? And Breed arrests him and throws him in the stockade and is like, I don’t believe you, you’re a spy. And tries to get him to tell the truth and whatever. And then ultimately the higher-ups come down and they’re like, actually that guy is a spy, maybe let him go and don’t be an asshole. And so Colonel Breed is furious that Reisman made him look bad, even though it’s his own fault.

Maartje: (12:05)
Yeah. Interesting. Should we get into the movie and talk more as we go along?
Sam and Tom: (12:12)
Yeah, let’s do it.

Maartje: (12:23)
Let’s get into the movie!
We open at Marston Tyne Military Prison in London in 1944. A young American soldier is hanged for an unknown crime. This is where we meet Major John Reisman, played by Lee Marvin, as he is one of the witnesses.

Sam: (12:37)
Yes, and the book opens the same way, witnessing this execution of a man that we don’t really know anything about. But crucially in the book, this is where we get an intro to this guy named Sergeant Morgan, who is the hangman at Marston Tyne. We get this period where this young man’s being executed from Reisman’s perspective, but we also get it from Sergeant Morgan’s perspective as the hangman. And then when Reisman goes on to run this unit of convicts, he brings Morgan with him almost as a boogeyman, because all of these men are frightened of the hangman once they learn who he is. You don’t really get that in the movie, but it’s a really interesting psychological gambit that Reisman tries, and I don’t know if it really works out for him ultimately.

Maartje: (13:21)
I thought this opening scene was interesting because you can kind of see Reisman’s discomfort with this man being hanged, not knowing if it was justified, which is of course a question that they try to answer in the movie but don’t really. And I thought they could have gone into that a little bit deeper, because if they open like this, that’s a good way to open that question and to question his morality. Where is he on this whole debate? And then they don’t take it home at all in the movie. I thought that was a shame.

Tom: (13:55)
I think it’s a good scene because it shows Reisman getting a sense of not feeling comfortable, but he doesn’t say anything. And we’ll find out soon that Reisman is also a bit of a loose cannon. So it’s also possible that he’s seeing a reflection of himself, or his own situation in the eyes of his superiors. Like a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God kind of thing.

Maartje: (14:20)
Yeah. I don’t know. It just had a whole bunch of things that could have gone so much deeper in the movie. I just feel like I missed it a bit. So I guess I’ll have to read the book.

Sam: (14:29)
Reisman is called into a meeting with a number of military higher-ups, including General Sam Worden, played by Ernest Borgnine, famous character actor Ernest Borgnine, and Major Max Armbruster, played by George Kennedy. He is assigned to take on a team of soldiers that are currently imprisoned for various serious crimes, train them up, and have them attack a chateau at Rennes, France, right before D-Day.

The goal is to kill as many German generals as possible because the chateau is a gathering place for these generals where they get together and plan their war games. And in exchange, the men will earn a reprieve from their sentences.

One thing I think is neat is they call it Project Amnesty. The idea is that originally they’re going to pick 12 criminals, but they don’t start by getting their sentences commuted. Reisman has to argue for their actual freedom because he says it’s not going to work unless they have something to fight for. If you just suspend their sentences for the time they’re serving, no one’s going to give it their all. So he has to fight the brass on their ability to get freed at the end.

Tom:
There’s another point here too where General Worden doesn’t like the idea of sending them behind lines to go kill staff officers. He refers to it as behind-the-lines nonsense. And Reisman equally doesn’t like the idea. He says it’s crazy. And in the end they sort of agree with each other. Once Reisman leaves the room, General Worden’s like, well, he is right about one thing. There’s definitely some lunatics in charge. There’s this sense that they’re not all on the same page as to why they’re doing the mission in the first place.

But I thought it’s interesting too, because they specifically say staff officers, and there are two kinds of officers in the military: staff officers and line officers. Line officers are the ones actually commanding troops and carrying out missions, whereas staff officers work in the military complex but aren’t necessarily commanding soldiers directly. So this is an attack that you might call a terror attack. They’re going in there to disrupt morale, to kill as many people as possible, but there’s no real strategic objective and they say as much. They’re just going there to cause as much damage as possible with no huge overall point to the mission.

And I think that was a major point for me in terms of this movie being anti-war, because all of these guys are being sent on effectively a suicide mission. The brass doesn’t care if they live or die. There’s not even really an ultimate goal. It’s like, yeah, kill as many generals as possible, but if you don’t, is it materially going to affect the outcome of D-Day? Probably not. The concept of these people being used for their bodies and knowing they’re going to be discarded at the end, that I think is an important part of the anti-war messaging of this movie.

Maartje: (17:27)
And to discipline Reisman in a way, I think. They think Reisman is a bad officer and they want to give him a terrible mission to teach him a lesson.

Tom: (17:38)
That’s right, because if it doesn’t work out, you get rid of him too. So he’s no longer the problem.

Maartje: (17:42)
Yeah. Right.

Sam: (17:44)
Though the Dirty Dozen aren’t real and this mission never occurred, there were Allied saboteurs operating behind enemy lines on the eve of the D-Day landings. There was an operation called Operation Jedburgh. It was the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, the British intelligence and special operations infrastructure, in conjunction with the OSS, which is the predecessor to the CIA. They dropped three-man teams into France, the Netherlands, and Belgium from June to September of 1944.

These three-man teams would be men capable of speaking French and getting in touch with the locals. Their job was to coordinate with and amplify the efforts of local resistance movements to sabotage German activity. They would get in touch with the resistance and call in drops of ammunition or explosives or whatever the resistance needed, and help coordinate those groups.

The novel in particular is inspired by a story that the author, Nathanson, heard from a combat photographer friend. He did two years of research trying to find out if the army ever gathered together a unit of convicts for behind-the-lines missions, but he was never able to find anything. And the seed of truth likely comes from a real-life saboteur unit from the 101st Airborne Division named the Filthy 13.

This group were dropped behind enemy lines during the Normandy invasion. They suffered terrible losses, including their CO, Lieutenant Charles Mellon. They also jumped into the Netherlands during Operation Market Garden and into Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. So they were all up in there. Anywhere fighting was happening in Europe in 1944 and 1945, they were there. They were effectively led by Sergeant Jack McNiece. He was supposedly part Choctaw. I don’t know if he actually was or if this was one of those like, yeah, my great-grandma was an eighth Cherokee or whatever. But because of him they all cut their hair into Mohawks and painted their faces with war paint. It was part of a team-bonding thing. He didn’t like following orders that didn’t directly relate to the mission. So he would do what he was told if he saw the point, but otherwise no. And a lot of the other guys picked up on that attitude from him. So they weren’t convicts, but they did have a reputation for being difficult. And they also had a reputation for not bathing, because they would get a water ration and want to save it to cook meat they had poached. Bathing: waste of water.

Maartje: (20:02)
I feel like in the Netherlands they wouldn’t have been very successful, because the Germans were so deeply ingrained in Dutch intelligence that almost every spy that was dropped was greeted by what they called a welcome party, which was a bunch of Nazis just showing up. I wonder if that mission was actually successful or not. I’ll have to look it up, and if I do find it I’ll put it on the website.

Sam: (20:28)
The Filthy 13 actually got mentioned in A Bridge Too Far as well, in the book I read.

Maartje: (20:35)
I wonder if I’ve heard this story on a tour before because I feel like I might have. I just cannot remember. This is my brain, you guys.

Sam: (20:43)
Yeah.

They really put these guys in the shit a lot of the time. I’m not kidding. When they had their first drop, like half of their guys died or were captured almost immediately. They kept ending up in jobs that nobody else wanted and accordingly getting knocked around for it.

Maartje: (21:01)
How nice.

Tom: (21:01)
Yeah. On the note of the use of prisoners as soldiers, I didn’t find any kind of detail or historical account of the Allies using prisoners or prisoner battalions. Although the Russians and the Germans both notably did. The Russians basically used them at the front of major attacks, as kind of expendable troops. And the Germans, there are some more specific examples.

Maartje: (21:21)
Didn’t we see a movie that had a prisoner battalion in it?

Tom: (21:29)
There were definitely Einsatz groups and units that were basically people freed from prison to go attack people. There’s one I’m thinking of that I can’t remember the name of, but it was very specifically known as a very brutal one.

Maartje: (21:42)
I can’t remember the movie. But maybe it was just the Germans calling out to disciplinary battalions saying, they are treating you like shit, come join us instead.

Sam: (21:54)
Reisman meets his 12 convicts and gets to show off his fighting skills immediately when mouthy Viktor Franko, played by John Cassavetes, can’t behave. John Cassavetes was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for this, but he did not win. Reisman then proceeds to speak to each of the men alone in their prison cells to propose the mission. He’s basically saying, look, you can come and work for me and it’ll suck, but at least you won’t have to serve your sentence. Or you can stay here and serve your sentence. And for some of you, that’s a date with the hangman.

The convicts include Joseph Vladislav, played by Charles Bronson, looking quite old, by the way. Robert Jefferson, played by former NFL player Jim Brown, which I’m throwing in there because I’m sure my dad knows who Jim Brown is. He quit the NFL because of this movie. He was gone for so long that the team owner was basically like, you can play football or you can be an actor. And Brown called his bluff and said, well, I guess I’m going to be an actor. Pedro Jimenez played by Trini Lopez, who was actually a fairly well-known singer at the time. It’s like when they cast that Jonas brother in the Midway movie, basically. And there’s a brief scene where we see Lopez playing guitar and singing a little, so we get a touch of that. Archer Maggot played by Telly Savalas.

Maartje: (22:52)
Ha! Hahaha.

Sam: (23:12)
Vernon Pinkley played by Donald Sutherland, and Sam Posey played by Clint Walker. Sergeant Clyde Bowren played by Richard Jaeckel, and he’s Reisman’s right-hand man.

Tom:
Yeah, this cast is so star-studded. Two of these people, Marvin and Bronson, are at the height of their careers at this point. Bronson’s star will still rise further, but for a lot of these people they’re new or relatively new to the screen and this is the movie they really get their start in. Jim Brown will eventually go on to play in a bunch of other movies. Donald Sutherland credits this movie with getting him a part in MASH, which is what really makes his career take off. Even Telly Savalas will eventually go on to be TV’s Kojak, which is where most people will remember him from. But even in this movie, he does a fantastic job.

Sam:
Yeah, he’s creepy.

Maartje: (24:10)
When Donald Sutherland died, my World War Two community timeline was full of pictures of him in this movie. All I basically knew about this part. I was like, oh, that’s that movie he was apparently in. He’s got such a face.

Tom: (24:25)
Yeah.

On set, they had what they called the top six and the bottom six, because even though there’s a dozen of them, we really only get about six in any kind of screen time. Donald Sutherland is billed in the bottom six. He’s really just supposed to be a nobody. But by the end of the film, you’ve seen so much of this guy and he gets so much screen time that it’s very clear he was intended to do a lot more than what they originally set out for him.

Maartje: (24:55)
He’s got such a face. Like, you can’t have him in your movie and not have him do anything. It’s impossible.

Sam: (25:06)
Yeah, definitely. He’s definitely an actor that, I mean, obviously he’s a great actor, but I also think it’s nice to see him because he’s just really normal-looking. So you’re like, yeah, he’s just the guy.

Maartje: (25:16)
Yeah.

I have a couple of favourites from this movie and I’ll tell you them so you don’t think I hate this movie. Vladislav is one of my favourites, and so is Jefferson, and then maybe Posey. Those are it for me.

Tom: (25:34)
What about you, Sam?

Sam:
Definitely Jefferson. I think he’s great. I think because I read the book first, I’m a little like, missed opportunities with some of these characters. But yeah, definitely Jefferson. I liked movie Posey, although in the book he’s Ute. He’s Indigenous. He does sun dances and talks about where he came from on the reservation or whatever. And then in the movie they cast a white guy who they sort of briefly allude to as being Native, but they don’t really get into it very much. So I was kind of like, man.

Tom:
Yeah, I really loved Jim Brown as Jefferson.

Sam:
Let me read you a little excerpt from the book so you can get an idea of Nathanson’s writing style, which is very direct, not a lot of purple prose. And I think the book suffered a little for me because I was reading From Here to Eternity by James Jones at the same time. And James Jones writes beautifully, like it’s artwork. You can easily flip through a James Jones book and find passages that are just stunning when you read them out loud.

Nathanson’s writing style isn’t really like that, and I don’t mean to compare it in a negative way because some people really prefer a more stripped-down approach. It’s just when I’m reading them side by side, you know. I’ll give you this excerpt from when Reisman gets all the convicts together. He’s pouring water for everybody, the CO serving the enlisted men type thing:

“When he had served them all, he squatted on his haunches in their midst, sipping his coffee. ‘Listen to me,’ he said softly. ‘Believe me when I tell you this.’ They looked at him with suspicion again, some still smarting with the anger of his discipline, some bored because they had heard it all before. ‘If all this means to you now is an escape from what you were facing back there at Marston Tyne, then quit now and go get yourself hung or put away in some detention barracks for 20 years or the rest of your life or whatever the hell your sentence is. You’ll never make it here.’ They looked at him with quickened interest. ‘But I tell you this, you’ve got a chance in this outfit a lot of troops would give their left nut to get. You don’t know what I mean now because you don’t know what’s ahead of you, but you will know as soon as you start shaping up like soldiers instead of prisoners. You can go from the ass end of this man’s army right up to the top with nobody out ahead of you. And I don’t mean you’re all going to be generals or anything like that.’ If he had expected laughter, he didn’t get any. ‘We’ve got enough generals. What we need is soldiers.'”

Maartje: (27:50)
I get what you’re saying about it not being like… It’s just different. I do enjoy that too.

Sam: (27:57)
Yeah, for sure. Markedly different from Jones, but not in a bad way, just in a different way. Yeah, Lee Marvin’s portrayal of Reisman is very understated. He’s so direct and to the point, but also not afraid to get his hands dirty. We’ve seen in the prison that he’s knocking Franco around and he’s not afraid to do it. He knows he has power over these people.

Tom:
And when he brings Franco to the ground, Bowren, the sergeant who’s the MP in charge of the prisoners, just turns a blind eye and says, all I see is the major defending himself against a convict. So he knows he has complete power over these guys, but he wants to shape them up at the same time. And the way he delivers that is with a lot fewer words and more by tricking them into behaving like a unit.

Sam:
Yeah, Reisman is really such a good example of this archetype of the hard-ass officer from that era. We’ve seen so many movies where I’m like, yeah, he’s interchangeable. You swap him out with anybody.

Maartje: (29:00)
Yeah. I would have liked them to play him maybe a little bit less straight. He’s just so straightforward in his acting. I would have liked to see that kind of conflict that we saw maybe in the first scene carried along into the rest of the movie.

Sam: (29:18)
The other thing too is that in the book, Reisman gets kind of softened because he has a girlfriend. He’s seeing this woman who works at a local inn where he stays sometimes. They’re not married yet, but he’s in love with her. And any time he gets time off, he goes to see her. There’s very much this contrast between the life he’s living with the convicts inside the stockade and this lovely glimpse of a future he gets with her.

And obviously you don’t get that in the movie, so you really only get one side of him. You only see what he’s like when he’s with these men.

Maartje: (29:48)
And again, that’s another thing these kind of 1960s movies do. They’re all so old. Like these people probably in real life would not have been that old.

Tom: (29:59)
Yeah, I actually looked it up for those curious. Both Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson were well into their 40s when this movie was made. And they look it, you can tell. One fun fact about that too is that Lee Marvin and Bronson both served during World War Two as well. I think Marvin was in the Marines and Bronson was in the US Army.

Sam:
Marvin was actually wounded at the Battle of Saipan in the Pacific, which we talked about in our Windtalkers episode if you want to learn more about that. And Charles Bronson was a tail gunner in a B-29 bomber in the Pacific and was also wounded in action. But it would probably be easier to list the cast members who didn’t serve, honestly. Ernest Borgnine was in the Navy. A lot of these guys had actual wartime experience during World War II.

Maartje: (30:44)
I want to ask you guys something, because you both seem to know Ernest Borgnine and I’m like, who is this man? I don’t know who this is.

Sam: (30:52)
Well, first of all, in the movie he’s the one with the funny teeth when he smiles. Yeah, he’s just such a well-known character actor. I’m trying to think of what would be the role for him that jumps out to me.

Maartje: (30:56)
Yeah, yeah.

Sam: (31:06)
It’s hard to narrow it down. He appeared in so much stuff. And because he was a character actor, it’s just like, yeah, he was very noticeable at the time.

Maartje: (31:16)
I’m trying to remember if I’ve seen him in the other war movies that we’ve done, but I don’t think so.

Sam: (31:21)
He’s in From Here to Eternity. When we watch that, you’ll see him again.

Maartje: (31:24)
Okay. Fun. That often happens to us when we watch an old movie. We’ll watch one and then we’ll watch another and another and there will be the same actors in each one.

Sam: (31:39)
That’s right. It happens a lot.

We’ve seen William Holden in like five million things.

Maartje: (31:46)
Yes.

Sam: (31:46)
His name, let me make sure I got his name right. Yeah, yes I did.

Maartje: (31:49)
Yes, you did get his name right. It is William. Yeah, and then we had the British actor. John Mills was also in everything.

Sam: (31:57)
You’re right. It’s just such a generic British name. I was like, I’m not going to get there.

Tom:
Maybe it’d be interesting to talk about what some of these guys are in prison for. I won’t go over all of them, but Franco is in prison because he robbed someone for the equivalent of $10. So he basically got enlisted and immediately tried to break from the army, rob someone, and get away. I think it said he actually killed someone or stabbed them to death. So that’s why he’s in jail and sentenced to be hanged.

Vladislav, that’s Bronson, he’s in jail because he shot a commanding officer in the back. However, the story he tells is that they were under harrowing gunfire and the CO tried leaving with all of the medical supplies. So he shot him to prevent him from leaving with the medical supplies. He’s immediately sympathetic because he just shot a commanding officer because he cares about his men, so he naturally has the strongest relationship with Reisman by the end of the film.

And then Jefferson is in jail. According to him, he’s just defending himself from a bunch of white soldiers that tried attacking him.

And I thought it was interesting because when Reisman tries to convince him to get involved in the mission, he’s saying, well, you know, the Germans, they’re the real racists here. And according to Jefferson, that’s your war. That’s not mine.

Maartje: (33:23)
Yeah. It reminded me in a way of both Masters of the Air and the film we saw recently. Was it Hart’s War? Just Black soldiers being accused of things that white soldiers probably wouldn’t be accused of. And it’s quite clear that even in the sentencing there must have been some racism going on.

Sam: (33:46)
I think it’s interesting that the movie tried to make these men redeemable. And in the book, the crimes that they have committed are cowardly. Some of them have killed women. Some of them are in there for heinous rapes.

Really the only one whose murder maybe seems kind of justified is the book version of Jefferson, who by the way has a less obviously Black-coded name in the book. He ends up killing an officer who jumped him, I believe. But the rest of these guys, the crimes that they did are very much like, yeah, there actually wasn’t a good reason. Sometimes people just make bad decisions and do bad things.

Tom:
Speaking of a heinous crime, Maggot absorbs all of the worst aspects of the people in the book. He just becomes the one prisoner that’s actually bad, because he’s in there for killing a woman according to his belief that God is talking directly to him and telling him to do it. And that’s where you get the impression that he’s not just a criminal. He might also be schizophrenic.

Sam:
Yeah. And they definitely amalgamate a bunch of characters into him. There’s a character in the book called Myron O’Dell who is certain the whole time that he’s innocent, that he didn’t murder this woman. And he’s the one who realises at the end that he did murder her. He’s kind of the one who’s a bit softer, and the other guys pick on him a little bit. And then there is a character named Maggot in the book. He’s extremely racist. He’s the one who’s always on the Jefferson character’s case. And his crime is that he raped a sex worker and doesn’t think it counts as rape because she was a sex worker. So these guys are very much like, there’s not a lot that’s likable about them, to be honest. And then the movie kind of tries to make their crimes a little bit more understandable, like you can be sympathetic, you can understand why in some situations what they did was warranted.

Maartje: (35:50)
I wonder if that’s because they want to give you something to root for in the movie. Because if these men are all so terrible, then why should we care whether they succeed on this mission or not?

Tom: (35:56)
That’s right. For Jimenez, they don’t even say what he did. Reisman just asks Bowren, did he ever at any point claim to be innocent? It’s kind of implied that he just committed some crimes to get away from the front. And I think, even though these guys are not necessarily likable in the book, they’re so well fleshed out that you don’t have to like the character to be very interested and absorbed in their arc and whether or not they’re able to change.

Sam:
And I slightly get the sense that the filmmakers who bought the rights to the book before it was finished liked the premise a lot more than the actual story. And if you view the movie strictly as an adaptation, I do think it misses the point.

So if you read the book, you’re going to have a very different experience than if you started with the movie first.

Maartje: (36:55)
Interesting. We had this conversation before, I guess, when we did our X-Company episodes. Jesus, that was very far back in my brain. But our X-Company episodes we also talked about, do characters have to be redeemable, or can we be interested in them even if they’re not? And for me this movie could have gone a little harder on fleshing them out. That would have made me care about them more, I think.

Sam and Tom: (37:23)
Yeah.

The men are driven to the middle of nowhere and made to build their own barracks. There’s actually a passage in the book where they get there and they open up the building supplies they’ve been sent. And one of the components is a gallows that isn’t being used. So you can imagine these men who have been sentenced to hang, given a reprieve, and then they open this box and there’s clearly a scaffold inside. That hangs over their heads. And then at the end, when they’re about to go on their mission and they’re tearing down the barracks and sending back the supplies, Reisman lets them burn the gallows. They pile the wood up and set it ablaze. So that’s symbolic too.

But yeah, they begin training for their mission. Franco attempts to escape almost immediately, but he’s prevented by his own criminal cohorts who fear that his escape will ruin their own chances at a reprieve.

Tom:
There’s one interesting part in that scene. Before Franco tries to escape, they’re listening to a radio broadcast in English that’s basically a demoralising broadcast about how Churchill would be a fool to invade mainland Europe. And they mention it’s from this guy called Lord Haw-Haw. That inspired me to look it up because I didn’t know if that was real or not. And it turns out that was a real thing. There was a radio critic from the BBC, Jonah Barrington, who referred to a radio broadcast he heard from Germany as Lord Haw-Haw, as in ha ha, because he spoke with an affected upper-class English accent. And there’s an interesting point with these radio broadcasts because Allied soldiers and civilians would actually tune into these German propaganda broadcasts to get information about casualties. If someone went on a mission like an air raid or a bombing run and they didn’t hear back, they would tune into a German propaganda broadcast to find out if something had happened to their friends. Surveys showed how widely people were listening to this German propaganda, and it prompted the British to revise their policy on posting casualty reports, because being more transparent was a way of stemming the tide of disinformation.

Maartje: (39:10)
No.

Sam: (39:27)
Lord Haw-Haw was part of the British fascist movement. And if you want to hear us talk more about that, you can listen to our episode about Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.

Maartje: (40:14)
That was a nice bridge. Didn’t expect that one.

It’s just how really smart these propaganda channels were, because they did also just play music so people would keep listening in between.

Tom: (40:25)
I think it’s interesting too. In the recent conflict between the United States and Iran, people in the New York Times were talking about the success of the Iranian propaganda videos, like these weird Lego AI videos mocking the United States. I think it’s an interesting point because no one really trusts anything that the White House says or takes seriously what is being published in American media. The distrust is so high. And I think that’s seen in how much traction the propaganda efforts of a supposed enemy can get, because people are treating it as more reliable.

Maartje: (41:02)
And also it’s funny. That is such a dangerous thing too. If people think it’s funny, they’re going to just watch it again because it’s still funny. But in the meantime, you’re also getting all this propaganda. Same thing with the music. If the music’s good, you’ll keep listening. But you also hear all the propaganda in the meantime.

Tom: (41:23)
Yeah, and I think that Americans are more familiar with the evils of their own government than they are with the Iranian government. So it’s easy to watch those Lego videos and be like, my god, this is so funny. And then it’s like, yeah, from a government that has killed tens of thousands of their own people. Yeah, for sure.

Maartje: (41:40)
Reisman at some point during training provokes Posey, who’s this big quiet man, into attacking him so he can teach him hand-to-hand combat methods. Posey doesn’t attack him, he’s like, don’t provoke me, don’t do it. This is also apparently how he committed his crime. But Reisman keeps insisting, and Posey does attempt to actually stab him but doesn’t manage to, because Reisman is pretty good at hand-to-hand combat.

Sam: (42:02)
Yeah.

Maartje: (42:06)
Captain Stuart Kinder, played by Ralph Meeker, who is a psychologist interviewing them all and trying to gain some insight into their character, expresses to Reisman this fear that all of the men are essentially untamable. Reisman doesn’t seem all too concerned. He’s also a career shithead, after all.

STom: (42:37)
I love the line from the psychologist. This exchange is great. The psychologist says, these guys think the US Army is their enemy. And Reisman replies, the US Army is their enemy. It kind of encapsulates that he understands the antagonism is between the US Army and these prisoners, and his job is to change it to between them and the actual enemy.

Maartje: (43:02)
Yeah, well the US Army did convict them and send them here. So I guess I can’t really blame them.

Tom: (43:10)
No, I mean, it speaks to the root of it. This movie is a military film that’s really anti-establishment, or at least has some anti-establishment leanings. I think it speaks to the timeframe in which this movie was made, because this movie was made in the late sixties, when America was starting to increase its involvement in the Vietnam War. And so anti-war sentiment was actually pretty high around that time.

And I think that was part of the movie’s success. It was a war movie that was not pro-establishment. And that way it could sort of have its cake and eat it too. It could appeal to people who wanted to see a war film without necessarily being super pro-United States.

Sam: Yeah. And in some ways safer and maybe more effective to couch an anti-war message in a safe war. If they’d made this movie about Vietnam, it might have been received very differently. But they made it about World War II.

Maartje: (44:07)
Do we think, Sam, that James Jones would have liked this movie?

Sam: (44:12)
I don’t know, I’m iffy. I think he would have liked the book.

Maartje: (44:14)
Yeah. Go listen to our episode about The Thin Red Line.

Samm : (44:18)
Franco manages to rally the other men into refusing to bathe or shave, earning them their nickname, the Dirty Dozen. They head to parachute training where Reisman’s old nemesis, Colonel Breed, played by Robert Ryan, calls his bluff about having a general with him. Breed is like, I’m going to get the brass band out here, get these men in their dress uniforms looking all smart, and make this guy look like an asshole because he probably doesn’t have a general with him. So thinking quickly, Reisman goes around to the back of the truck where his convicts are and says, yeah, there’s a general here, but he’s incognito and doesn’t want anyone to know he’s a general. So he gets Pinkley out and has Pinkley pretend to be a general. Pinkley walks up and down the lines inspecting the men. Where are you from, soldier? Never heard of it. And I got a kick out of this because apparently this scene was supposed to be Posey’s scene, but the actor, Clint Walker, thought it was beneath the dignity of his character as a Native American. He didn’t want to do it. So they switched it and it ended up being Pinkley instead.

Maartje: (45:22)
Spicy. I like it.

Sam: (45:23)
This scene is so funny. It still holds up. The brass band would start and then the truck wasn’t there and then the brass band would go down and then the brass band would start again and then the truck still wasn’t there. I was giggling. Sutherland does such a good job too.

Maartje: (45:36)
Me too.

Yeah, they managed to pick the least general-looking general.

Tom: (45:43)
I know, it’s funny because I looked it up and Donald Sutherland was like 30 when this movie was made, but for some reason he looks like a child. He does. He looks 17. He has just such a narrow, young face.

Maartje: (45:50)
It’s also the ears, I think. He’s got little child ears.

Sam: (46:00)
Yeah. According to Sutherland, when Clint Walker refused to take on the general role, Aldrich just pointed across the table at Sutherland and said, you with the big ears. Fair enough.

Maartje: (46:15)
Vladislav is beaten by two paratroopers in a latrine on Breed’s orders.

They’re trying to determine the top-secret mission of the Dirty Dozen. He doesn’t talk, but soon Colonel Breed shows up at their training area and tries to bully them into telling him what they know. But Reisman turns up in time to stop him, thankfully.

Sam: (46:37)
There’s a subplot in the book that didn’t make it into the movie where the estate they’re training on is owned by someone who’s a higher-up in the British military and also some kind of nobility. His daughter lives in the house and she does not want the Dirty Dozen there, but her dad is like, it’s my house, so they’re going to be there whether you like it or not. The whole time she doesn’t like that they’re there. At one point Reisman sets them a mission to sneak into her house at night and take things to prove they went in and got out without getting caught. And then you find out she’s actually friends with Colonel Breed and she’s the one who called him. And you also find out her boyfriend is an SS lieutenant. So she very much doesn’t want these men killing German generals either. They cut that from the movie, which I fully understand because it’s already two and a half hours. But I did like that the book made an effort to include some women who had personalities and things to do.

Maartje: (47:50)
There aren’t many women in this and the women that are in it are in questionable positions.

Tom: (47:55)
Definitely.

After Vladislav is confronted, Breed eventually comes to take over their entire camp and lines them up at gunpoint. And then what ends up happening is Reisman sneaks back into his own camp and holds up all of the airborne division, Colonel Breed’s men. The Dirty Dozen basically disarm the airborne, punch them and kick them when they’re down, and we get this sense of them finally starting to come together. They’re finally seeing a common enemy. It just turns out the common enemy is Colonel Breed.

Sam:
Reisman, deciding that his men need a break and a reward, hires a number of sex workers to come out to the training area for a party. And I did get a kick out of the part where all the men are standing in the barracks on one side of the room and all the women are standing on the other side, all staring at each other, because the men just can’t believe there are women there after weeks and weeks, and these women are like, what have we gotten ourselves into? But they end up having a little party.

Maggot is furious, of course, because he’s very religious and tells them all they’re going to hell. And this is one part where I thought the movie did it better than the book, because in the book Reisman hires a single sex worker and brings the men into the cabin where she is one at a time. It’s not coercive, she’s into it and she’s obviously getting paid, but he brings them in one at a time. And it’s not all of them, because Maggot doesn’t go in and there are a couple of others who don’t want to, and Posey doesn’t want to because he’s married and loyal to his wife. But yeah, she ends up with nine or ten dudes in a row. Yeah, in the movie there are eight of them.

Maartje: (49:44)
Kind of turns it into this innocent little party, which is kind of sweet when they dance. Like, who knows what else happens, but at least in the movie there’s some foreplay. Innocence.

Sam: (49:57)
Yes.

Reisman ends up in hot water. He convinces the army brass to allow his men to compete in a war games competition so that they can prove their mettle. And the ultimatum is pretty much, if your guys aren’t successful here, then you’re done.

Tom:
This is where the movie to me becomes full summer camp.

It’s now a red team versus blue team. Colonel Breed’s men are the red team and they basically have to go in and capture the HQ and all of the command staff to prove themselves. The first image we get of them on the scene is them showing up in a truck with both red and blue armbands, switching to blend in wherever they need to go, showing that they’re willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get their way.

Maartje: (50:49)
I enjoyed the, what is he called, the guy with the green armband, the spectator.

Tom: (50:56)
The Observer. He’s actually a major, the one who recommends the war game. They’re kind of thinking of how Reisman is saying, I’ll put one of my guys up against 30 of Colonel Breed’s guys. And they say, well, how can we prove that? And so that major who’s kind of friends with Reisman suggests, well, there’s a war game where Breed’s soldiers are actually involved. And that’s kind of where they get the idea. He sticks around to watch them too. Yeah, he’s fun.

Maartje: (51:24)
I enjoy that they kind of ally with him a little bit and are like, when they steal an ambulance, they’re like, are you coming? And then they fling him off the ambulance later.

After the war game, after they’ve taken Colonel Breed captive and proved themselves, they parachute into northern France. They have a thoroughly planned mission, and I really enjoyed this part where they just recite their mission plan three times. It’s so funny.

Vladislav and Reisman infiltrate the chateau where the German generals are gathered and having a party, and the others are responsible for various other tasks such as destroying communications, guarding escape routes, and keeping a lookout. It’s not an easy mission but I did enjoy Vladislav and Reisman being buddies together.

Sam: (52:17)
Yeah, Vladislav speaks German, notably. Reisman doesn’t seem to speak a word of German, so he’s standing around in this Nazi officer’s uniform and people keep trying to speak to him and he’s just like, I don’t know. And I’m just like, would you not send in one of your guys who speaks German? Would you not do that?

Maartje: (52:32)
Ha!

Tom: (52:34)
It’s so funny seeing them both show up in German officer uniforms. We as the audience don’t know anything about their plan. All we hear is them reciting it at the end and then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, they’re going to pretend to be German officers to get into this chateau. Two people you’ve never seen before showing up, and one of them can’t even speak German. Like, no one has any questions about this.

Maartje: (52:58)
What would make me laugh the most. It’s like, what? You understand everything else but not the weather?

Tom: (53:17)
Yeah. Did you understand what the German officers were saying?

Maartje: (53:21)
I did, but also, being Dutch, we get subtitles for the German speech. Unlike you.

Sam: (53:28)
Yes, they did not subtitle the German, or at one point the French staff are speaking and obviously I could understand what the staff are saying, but they didn’t subtitle any of the other languages, which made me laugh. They’re like, you don’t need to know what the Germans are saying. It’s not important.

Maartje: (53:42)
It’s really weird, because my version of the movie had English subtitles for the German and then also Dutch subtitles, so I had the English subtitles on screen as part of the movie and then the regular subtitles were also working, so I had double subtitles. But not for all of the German. They kind of picked what they wanted to subtitle. Because at some point you see two guards at the gate speaking German and they aren’t subtitled, but other bits are. Like, what’s going on? Why is half of it subtitled and the other half not?

Tom: (54:20)
Yeah. So at the onset of their mission, we do find out there is a casualty as soon as they get on the ground. That’s Jimenez. They say he got caught in an apple tree and snapped his neck.

That actually comes from Trini Lopez, who had a recording contract with a company owned by Frank Sinatra. They were good friends. Sinatra told him, Trini, you’ve got to get out of here, you’ve got to focus on your music career. So he just leaves the production of the film and they end up having to kill off his character. Yeah, he dies off-screen.

Maartje: (54:55)
On this mission, Pinkley is Donald Sutherland’s moment to shine in doing nothing but looking so interesting while doing nothing.

Tom: (55:05)
Yeah, he’s standing outside at the car pretending to be a driver and keeping an eye on things.

At one point a German soldier comes over and starts speaking to him, and of course he doesn’t understand what he’s saying, so he starts getting nervous, thinking, am I going to have to kill this guy? The German soldier eventually just takes his cigarette, lights his own with it, and gives it back to him. So it’s a little bit of fun comedy there where Sutherland doesn’t say anything, but his face says everything. Yeah.

Sam:
Maggot, deciding that he believes these men of the Dirty Dozen deserve whatever they get because they’re all sinners, kills a woman and then opens fire on his own guys. Jefferson kills him, but now the Germans know they’re there.

The German brass retreat to a bunker. On the roof, the guys have blown the communication system, so at least the Germans can’t call in reinforcements. So Reisman and co. lock the German brass in the bunker, go outside to where the air vents are, and proceed to pour grenades and gasoline into them. You see all the Germans in the bunker yelling and trying to get out, and then they of course light up the gasoline. Some explosions, all coming up through the air vents.

They also destroy the chateau. It crumbles down quite spectacularly.

Tom:
If you’re feeling a little sympathetic for the Germans there, let me just say. Maggot does lose his mind, holds a woman at knifepoint and basically tells her to scream, which she does. Then there’s a moment of silence. And then all of the German officers just start laughing.

Thinking, is it nerves or passion? Yeah, they’re like, a woman is being sexually assaulted? That’s hilarious. Anyway, back to our card game.

So this scene with the vents and the gasoline. Jefferson has to be the one to drop a live grenade into each of four vents and make it to the half-track before the first grenade goes off. And it’s a spectacular scene. You see Jim Brown really give it his all. Unfortunately, he gets shot. And in my notes I say the film treats Jefferson’s death as appropriately tragic, because he’s the only one that actually gets a music sting. You get a few moments on his body where you really see, no, he’s gone. Whereas every other character, when Pinkley gets shot or when Vladislav gets shot, it’s just over. It doesn’t matter, they’re done, they’re off the movie. Yeah. When Jefferson died, I was like, no, not Jefferson!

Maartje: (57:55)
I feel like even the Dirty Dozen themselves were like, no, not Jefferson.

Sam: (58:01)
Right? The chateau was one of the largest set pieces ever built. It was 240 feet long and 50 feet tall, and they surrounded it with extensive landscaping for realism. No green screens. It took 250 people four months to build. And then they realised that in order to blow it up they would need 70 tons of dynamite because it was so solid. So instead of blowing up the replica they’d built, they ended up building another replica made of plastic and cork that was much easier to destroy.

Maartje: (58:30)
Such a shame, because it looked masterful and then they had to destroy stuff again. That’s kind of what makes me sad about movies sometimes. There’s all this art going into it and then it gets destroyed or disposed of.

Tom: (58:43)
Well, there are more chateaus where that one came from.

Maartje: (58:45)
Fair.

German reinforcements begin to arrive, even though they’ve been trying to hold them off. But Posey is the one to hold them back. Franco also dies, it’s not just Jefferson. He dies on the truck, on their big half-track. Just a German tank-like vehicle.

Just as they think they’re safe, he gets shot. And ultimately, Reisman, Bowren, and Vladislav are the only ones who are able to make it to safety as the American troops advance across Normandy after D-Day. And Vladislav gets his pardon in the end.

Sam: (59:23)
In the book, Franco decides before the mission that the first thing he’s going to do when he sees a German general is try to surrender. He’s just going to be like, take me to a POW camp kind of thing. And his death is the result of them fleeing the area. Posey is holding the Germans off so the rest of the guys can survive, and he’s absolutely kicking ass. He’s a huge guy, just taking people out. It’s great for him. Unfortunately it does result in his death, but he gets this spectacular moment in the sun. And as they’re fleeing with Posey behind them, they come to this gate where there happen to be German guards and Franco puts a gun to Reisman’s head and says, stop the half-track, we’re going to surrender to the Germans. And I think it’s Bowren who shoots him and throws him off the half-track.

Maartje: (1:00:16)
Up to Bowren because he was an MP, right? Before.

Sam: (1:00:20)
He’s an MP in the movie, he’s not an MP in the book.

Tom:
Yeah, in the movie he’s actually kind of the guy assigned to them in the jail. And it’s interesting because they keep him around. He takes the place of the hangman from the book, I guess, in the sense that he’s the guy from jail who was in charge of them there. And now he’s in charge of them in the training camp. And he goes on the mission with them too.

Maartje: (1:00:41)
Just to remind them that jail is still out there waiting for them, I guess. Until he actually finds out that they’re decent soldiers and goes on the mission.

Sam: (1:00:52)
Well, in the book too, Reisman doesn’t want Bowren to go on the mission. He says, you’re not coming. And Bowren says, okay, cool. And then Bowren sneaks all of his stuff onto the plane. And when they’re up in the air over Normandy, Reisman is like, Bowren, what are you doing here? And Bowren’s like, I wanted to come. Did he not notice? You would think he would notice. Right, there’s 12 of them, it’s pretty clear.

Maartje: (1:01:09)
I’m on the plane now!

Sam: (1:01:15)
Well, maybe he’s distracted. They are about to go on a mission. He doesn’t know if these guys are just going to turn around and shoot him when they get on the ground.

Tom:
There’s a funny little bit where Bronson talked about shooting the final scene. Lee Marvin has to be Reisman driving the half-track in the getaway scene, and he doesn’t show up on set during filming. So they end up looking for him and they find him in a tavern, just completely hammered. They bring him to the set and he basically falls out of the car. Bronson goes over and screams at him, I’m going to kill you. So other people in the cast have to keep Bronson from punching Lee Marvin in the face to get him to do the final scene. But as they say, as soon as you put Lee Marvin behind the wheel of the half-track, he really kicks into high gear and delivers a fine final scene.

Sam:
Just like, he’s hammered, let him drive the half-track. Okay, he’s still good to drive.

Maartje: (1:02:12)
Wow.

Tom: (1:02:18)
In my estimation of the film, it’s hard to overestimate the influence it had afterwards. It ended up making a huge amount of money at the box office, apparently enough that Aldrich could buy his own production studio afterwards. So he ends up spending the next decade just doing whatever project he wants.

And the concept of the Dirty Dozen ends up going on to inspire Enzo G. Castellari, who makes a movie called Inglorious Bastards in 1977, which of course then gets spiritually remade by Tarantino. And the main plot element of the Dirty Dozen gets revised and revitalised in Suicide Squad.

This concept of taking a bunch of prisoners and sending them on a suicide mission ends up kind of living beyond the movie itself. There’s even a Simpsons reference where Bart has to sneak into Shelbyville and recruits a bunch of people, and ends up needing a religious guy who goes crazy at the end. Todd’s the religious guy who goes crazy at the end. Yeah, definitely.

Maartje: (1:03:20)
Hm.

Sam: (1:03:21)
Definitely huge culturally. And if you’re interested and you loved this movie, there are actually three sequels that came out in the 1980s and I haven’t watched them. I’ve heard they’re not good. But some of the original cast returned and you can imagine how old they were by the time they made them.

Maartje: (1:03:39)
I’d be interested to watch them just for that reason.

Tom: (1:03:43)
They might be so bad they’re good, but they do look bad, that’s for sure.

Maartje: (1:03:48)
What are they called, the Dirty 13?

Sam: (1:03:51)
No, they have “The Dirty Dozen” in the title. Something something, the dirty dozen something else, something something. I think it’s like The Next Mission and then one of them is called The Deadly Mission. Yeah, yeah. Prime sequel, babe. It really is.

Maartje: (1:03:57)
Oh god.

Sam: (1:04:05)
Hang on. There are three sequels. We have The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission, which came out in 1985, and Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine are back, looking haggard one assumes. The next one is The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission, which came out in 1987. Telly Savalas comes back but plays a different character. And then The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission came out in 1988, and Telly Savalas once again returns as this other character.

Maartje: (1:04:27)
I thought you were kidding about the names!

Tom: (1:04:30)
No, no.

Maartje: (1:04:32)
Maybe one day we’ll do a sequel episode where we just watch bad sequels of World War II movies.

Sam: (1:04:38)
We should do that. That should be our Christmas episode.

Maartje: (1:04:41)
And that’s the end of the movie.

Before we rate this movie, I would like to remind you that you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts and rate us five stars, or you can send this episode to a friend.

Sam: (1:05:01)
Every time you send this episode to a friend, Ernest Borgnine gets to visit an orthodontist.

Maartje: (1:05:05)
I have no idea what that means.

Sam: (1:05:07)
Because his teeth are so bad. He loves it.

Maartje: (1:05:11)
I didn’t hear you say an orthodontist, I thought you were saying like a place. I was like, what’s a North Adonis?

Tom: (1:05:19)
That’s what I heard too. I heard North Adonis and I’m like, that might be a reference to something.

Sam:
How many deadly missions out of ten would you rate this movie?

Maartje: (1:05:30)
Man, I don’t know. I’m going to give it [missing] missions out of ten. I didn’t enjoy it that much, but I did enjoy talking about it quite a bit. I just, I don’t know. Wasn’t my kind of movie, maybe. What about you, Tom? You go next.

Tom: (1:05:43)
Fair.

Okay, I’m going to rate this one seven deadly missions out of ten. Because while there’s a lot of great points about how it doesn’t hold up in terms of character development, sometimes you just need to go on an adventure with twelve of your buddies. Sometimes you just need to hang out and have a lot of hijinks and really show the top brass who’s boss. At the end of the day, you guys take war too seriously and sometimes it just needs to be a blast.

Maartje: (1:06:14)
Thought you were going to rate it higher than that, actually.

Tom: (1:06:17)
No, I mean, okay, so it is two and a half hours long and you get a lot of stuff in there that has nothing to do with what feels like the point of the film. You don’t really get character development in the sense of them arriving at this complete journey where they’re rehabilitated or men of honour. You don’t really get a sense of them doing anything important.

And they really set up at the beginning that their job is to do something that no one thinks matters. So it’s fun. There’s not a lot of stakes involved. It’s not satisfying in a way. Although for an action movie at the end, you do get a good bit of action, so you do get a decent war movie. It’s just held back by the fact that you have a lot of names to remember. The truth is you’re only really going to walk away knowing three or four people. So it suffers from that, even though there is an ensemble cast.

Sam:
Yeah. And in the book too, originally Reisman doesn’t know what their mission is going to be until training is almost over. They’ve been training for months and the men are like, what are we going to do? And he’s like, I don’t know. So he finally goes to meet with the higher-ups and they’re like, yeah, we’re just going to drop them behind enemy lines in groups of one or two and have them sabotage stuff. And if they fail, it doesn’t really matter. And Reisman is like, well, you can’t motivate people to do their best if they’re so clearly disposable. So he’s the one who says, I need them to drop as a group because that’s how I’ve trained them to work together and I need to go with them. And they’re like, well, what if you die in the attempt? And he’s like, well, then maybe we figure out a way that we get home after the mission. We don’t just drop these guys in and then forget about them. And him going to bat for them, even though he doesn’t one hundred percent trust them, I think is a core piece of the Reisman character arc. And I don’t know that we get that much of that in the movie.

And I’m also going to rate this movie seven deadly missions out of ten. I think the chateau scene is really fun. It’s a good combat sequence, fun to watch them infiltrate and blow things up. But I think I would have liked it better if I hadn’t read the book first, because yeah, as an adaptation, perhaps not that great. If it were adapted today, you’d have more opportunities to explore these guys and allow them to be more morally nuanced and really make use of the fact that they’re convicts who have done bad things. Is it possible for them to redeem themselves? So yeah, pretty passable as a war movie and obviously a huge cultural touchstone. Just maybe not a great adaptation of the book.

Maartje: (1:09:07)
You know what I would have liked? I would have liked Colonel Breed at the end getting it in his face that they succeeded on their mission.

Tom: (1:09:16)
Yeah. Fuck that guy. Definitely. He’s the real enemy.

Maartje: (1:09:20)
Exactly.

Tom: (1:09:20)
All right, I’ll try to find a better recommendation for you two. Something you can really bite into.

Maartje: (1:09:27)
No, I feel like it’s one that we just needed to have seen. It’s part of the war movie canon that people like.

Tom: (1:09:35)
Definitely part of the World War II zeitgeist, for sure.

Maartje: (1:09:40)
Well, Tom, thank you so much for being on with us. It was really fun.

Sam and Tom: (1:09:43)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Maartje: (1:09:45)
If you have another recommendation, I’d love to hear it. But until then, I would like to thank everyone for listening. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts and rate us five stars. You can send this episode to a friend. You can follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast, or you can visit our website, rosiethereviewer.com, for more info. And we’ll see you next week.

Sam: (1:10:09)
Bye.