Actually, the Foul Fourteen...

Rating: Null/10 (30 August 2002)

Spoilers ahead...
It's funny -- 1967 saw the summer of love but it also saw the release of a raw, violent war movie in which more than a few of the heroes are psychopaths. I've kind of wanted to see this movie since I was a kid, but it's taken me a good three decades to realize that goal. It had all my little kid friends abuzz in the '70s -- those who'd seen it, somehow -- and I can see why. This, really, is your basic macho war movie. It's a kind of film that doesn't get made much any more, or -- at least -- not released theatrically. It's got fewer redeeming qualities than war movies (or movies set during wartime -- there's a difference) made since the mid-'70s, basically in light of the American experience in Vietnam and the domestic reactions to that experience, and it's more a straight shoot-'em-up that almost glorifies violence. It has a few subtleties, however, that set it apart from the truly mindless violence of some films that I could name (many of them from the '80s). The film touches upon class, race, and other social structures and its diverse cast does a great job of creating and resolving conflict as kind of a microcosm of any multicultural society. Justice and the idea that officers might sometimes be the last people that you'd want to have running things also belong as major themes, though they've been more fully and effectively developed before (e.g., "What Price Glory," "All Quiet On The Western Front") and since (e.g., "Apocalypse Now," "Gallipoli," "Hamburger Hill").
The cast works really well, and includes some unlikely candidates such as footballer Jim Brown (who did a great job in this, his second movie, by the way) and musician Trini Lopez (who even gets to sing a song). Lee Marvin is excellent, as always, as the gruff but not humor-free (and, in his own right, subversively insubordinate) major who's charged with the team of criminals that become the Dirty Dozen. I don't know who thought of casting the prototypical Noo Yawker Telly Savalas as a southern religious maniac (emphasis on maniac) but it does work and he's scarily and creepily good in the role. Charles Bronson plays it straight in one of his better roles and does a good job. John Cassavetes delivers the most intense performance (if I recall from seeing him in other films, I think that he _always_ did) as a troublemaker and his is a standout performance. Donald Sutherland's character isn't fleshed out much, but he does get to act the fool in a couple of memorable scenes, including one in which he's passed off as a general. The massive Clint Walker, who looks like a 70s-era Big Jim action figure come to life, is also great as a backwoods giant who's gentle until pushed too far. Richard Jaeckel also acquits himself well as an MP in what I expected to be a short role, though he ended up going on the mission and was one of the three that survived. George Kennedy and Ernest Borgnine don't have huge roles in this film but each is good in their part. Of note perhaps is that both Lee Marvin and Telly Savalas were WWII veterans, both wounded in combat.
This bunch of misfits are eventually whipped into a unit and they're such underdogs that most viewers will probably revel in their victory over Lee Marvin's priggish superior officer (played to arrogant perfection by Robert Ryan). There's a fair bit of humor in this film, too, at least until the attack is launched.
This is a violent movie and I found one particularly interesting moment to be when one of the Dirty Dozen is told to execute some Germans -- he obviously doesn't want to do it but the script doesn't belabor the point, it merely makes it obvious without him saying a word. So, too, do some of the soldiers seem to harbor some qualms about obliterating Germans that they've trapped in a cellar. The Germans herded below are slaughtered -- looks like a war crime to me, friends and neighbors. In this respect, the film pulls no punches and, although otherwise not a particularly realistic film, it shows quite nicely (i.e., disturbingly) the ugliness and brutality of war. It's also commendable that this film never dehumanizes the Germans. For that matter, if anyone are brutal thugs here it'd have to be the Dirty Dozen.
I guess the bottom line for me is that I basically like this film, though I'm quite disturbed by some elements within (dumping grenades and fuel on trapped German officers and their ladies being the biggie) and I'd be a bit worried about someone who was a rabid fan of the movie -- at least if he giggled like Telly Savalas' character while watching Germans bite the dust. Maybe, on second thought, I just like the first half of this film. By the way, Lee Marvin's character has a German name, that I'm sure was not unintentional ('rice man,' I think...I'd speculate that this was an oblique reference within an oblique reference, related to the Southeast Asian conflict that the US was embroiled in during 1967, but I'm not sure to what extreme these kinds of things need to be taken).