The Dirty Dozen

Lee Marvin plays a U.S. officer tasked in 1944 with training twelve hardened criminals (the dream cast ranges from John Cassavetes to Donald Sutherland) for a suicide mission. By cynically amplifying a World War II spectacle through the skeptical lens of the Vietnam War era, Robert Aldrich’s anti-authoritarian, corrosive rage struck a nerve with the zeitgeist like a bomb — epitomized by Robert Jefferson’s (played by football legend Jim Brown) infamous “suicide run” in the finale, which was cheered even as it evoked the Holocaust and the U.S. military’s napalm attacks. It is the climax of a deconstruction of the war film—carried out in the spirit of nonconformism—that was controversially criticized at the time yet proved extremely successful: It is precisely through this gripping staging that Aldrich underscores the dehumanizing nature of war. Claude Chabrol called the film “a vehemently anti-militarist treatise (murderers in peacetime are the best soldiers, and vice versa).” (C.H.)