Since this film's been meticulously analyzed already by thousands of reviewers, bloggers and book writers........just a few random, scattered thoughts....
Aldrich smashes the moral compass......as much as we deeply admire Alfred Molina as an actor, we didn't believe for one minute his portrayal of the legendary movie director in that TV mini-series "Feud", about the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford 'Baby Jane' smackdown. Molina's Aldrich came off as a simpering, weak-willed typical Hollywood invertebrate......
We don't buy it. The guy who successfully wrangled the twin Medusas and made the riotously amoral "Dirty Dozen", the first mainstream Hollywood war movie that celebrated indiscriminate slaughter........you know this guy had a deep core of steel in him.
The MGM suits squirmed and bristled at Aldrich's grand finale......which had his criminal killer-soldiers immolate and explode a horde of trapped, defenseless German generals and their well-dressed whores. (In fact, the entire last half hour of the film is a virtual orgy of death for everyone involved...Germans, whores and most of the Dozen....)
But Aldrich wouldn't change a frame.....the film was a summing up and the epitome of his cruel hard eye on humanity.......it was as if he'd remade his own radioactive noir "Kiss Me Deadly" times twelve.....instead of one brutally murderous Mike Hammer, he offered us a dozen.....and imagined what it would be like if they all went to war together, without the brake of morals or the Geneva convention. What he presented to 1967 audiences, besides the nihilistic violence quickly creeping into studio films, was an unvarnished vision of war as an insane enterprise, best executed by violent sociopaths......and to the joy of MGM's accountants, Aldrich's film had it both ways with audiences, lampooning the lunacy of by-the-book warfare in previous war films and still regaling the crowd with firepower and death on a mass scale.....
And while we're thinking of it......
The Missing Mastermind......the one character who remains offscreen: whoever, high up in the chain of command, thought up the idea of using condemned-to-hang killers as suicide commandos.......early on, Lee Marvin, to the outrage of his superiors, openly questions the sanity of whichever general dreamed this brainstorm.......we wish the script had revealed him (FDR maybe?), having him show up for a fun meeting with the film's few survivors at the end......
Donald Sutherland Early scenes seem to vaguely imply he's simple-minded, but his showstopping (and career-making) comic turn as a fake general display a guy who's a wicked, master satirist. We couldn't help noticing.....Sutherland's ludicrous posturing as an imitation General reminded us a lot of Trump's ridiculous posturing as an imitation President......
Telly Savalas The film's best visual joke: Savalas, the evangelical serial rapist-killer, exiled to high elevation guard tower duty while Lee Marvin soothes the Dozen with a gaggle of nervous whores......
Trini Lopez Part of the great tradition of shoe-horning pop stars into movies they have no business being in......as idiotic as his presence is in the film, his exit became as abrupt as a fleeting talk show appearance. After walking off the film for other gigs, the film simply erases him offscreen in a supposed parachute accident.
Jim Brown In case you didn't know what a crowd-pleasing showman Robert Aldrich was......consider which of the Dozen he picked to make a climactic 50 yard dash.......
Even if these 50 year anniversary films make us closely check the cholesterol level on our supermarket stuff, "The Dirty Dozen" never gets old for us......a landmark vision of combat that welded a modern era's random, overwhelming violence with old-school Hollywood tropes, turning them inside out and backwards. 4 stars (****).....Donald Sutherland's faux-General cracks, when inspecting the troops...."Very pretty....very pretty.....but can they fight?......oh yes they can.
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