"Killing generals could get to be a habit with me."

Rating: 8/10 (25 May 2008)

Wow, it's forty years since this film was made, and forty years since I last saw it. I've been revisiting some of the pictures I initially saw upon their original theatrical release in order to see how my impression of the movie might have changed over time. "The Dirty Dozen" still holds up as a strong war time drama, made most compelling for me by the way Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) reads each of his 'recruits' in order to mold them into a cohesive unit. In fact it's the first third of the picture that I enjoy the most, as the major characters are introduced and we get to know just enough about each to understand how their motivations might be exploited. John Cassavetes' portrayal of Victor Franko may have been the most complex on the surface, but Telly Savalas had an unusual assignment in the character of Archer Maggott. Although couched in religious extremism, I think the character went beyond that into a complex moral ambiguity. It was the kind of character that could have been the subject of a picture all by itself.
The casting surprise, if you grew up in the 1960's, had to do with Trini Lopez as the soldier Jimenez. Until this picture, my only recollection of Lopez would be as a singer with some upbeat singles hits like "If I Had a Hammer" and "Lemon Tree". I'm curious as to how he was selected for a part in this picture, since the other main characters were already fairly well established as actors (Marvin, Savalas, Bronson, George Kennedy), or on the rise (Donald Sutherland, Jim Brown). To his credit, Lopez did a fairly good job for the limited role he had.
What I couldn't quite understand was why the Robert Ryan character, Colonel Breed, wound up at odds with Major Reisman and the Dozen. He was aware from the start that Reisman would be training his men in secrecy for a behind the lines mission, so it didn't seem logical to me that he would try to thwart it's progress. It was mentioned earlier that Reisman and Breed didn't see eye to eye based on a former association, but still, the new objective for which Reisman was training his men was for the good of the war effort.
I've read with interest a number of the negative comments on the picture regarding the method of executing the mission via gasoline and explosives. I don't recall how that scenario was reviewed back in the late Sixties, but it seems we've come so far in terms of political correctness over the last forty years that there seems to be something to offend someone in every picture since, including cartoons. For my part, war is a dirty business where political correctness doesn't apply. Hitler didn't seem too concerned about incinerating women and children along with Jewish men as part of his ethnic cleansing program. If anything, the picture absolutely left out any hint of the savagery and brutality of Nazi officers, but I didn't read any complaints about that. Interesting.
Also interesting is the point that the fictionalized events of the story were set BEFORE America's entry into the European Theater with the Allied D-Day landing at Normandy. It's easy to overlook that fact while the movie goes through it's paces, as the viewer's memory tends to recall events and battles of World War II that hadn't occurred yet relative to the story being told.