The Quintessential Guy Movie

Rating: 7/10 (14 April 2016)

49 years after its release, you can still ask, "Have you seen The Dirty Dozen," and the look of bloodlust and delight on the other person's face will tell you everything you need to know. TDD is one of those flicks that got released in VHS way back when, and got shown on superstations about once a week, and the end result is like Andrew McLagen's John Wayner, Chisum. It seems as if everybody--of the guy persuasion--has seen this great, great Robert Aldrich movie.
It's so ugly and perverse and the very thought of the good guys herding Nazis and their women into the basement of a château in order to drop grenades down the ventilators and then incinerate them is enough to make anyone who is seeing it for the first time let out an OMG (or something a bit more masculine). The Dirty Dozen is one of the most tightly constructed, bone-crunching, knife-slashing, burp-gun blazing alternative-to-your-average-war-movie movies I've ever seen.
And it came out before the rating system, so parents who showed up with their little 'uns were probably thinking, "OMG!" This is the pure tough-guy movie. The convicts are rapists and murderers, their commander (Lee Marvin) is an insubordinate malcontent, and it takes almost no time for Aldrich to start converting you into big fans of the rapists, murderers, and malcontents.
The message is simple--War is a crime, so why not use criminals?
But the viewers, for the most part, never get to that deep-think; instead, they just groove to the turning of convicts into what they were supposed to be, soldiers.
And there's that scene that makes everyone in the audience who has ever wanted to witch-slap his boss laugh out loud, when Marvin stops prissy General Robert Ryan from dry-shaving John Cassavetes by firing a burst from his machine gun as a final/only warning.
Take that, authority!
Come to think of it, this is the sort of story that teenagers probably loved. It's anti-army army, beat-the-Nazis-by-flippin-off- the-man, pure sixties manly-man rebelliousness.
Just writing about this movie makes me want to eat a big-ass burger, lots of onion, and walk it through a warm room, sweetheart!
Forget Cialis, boys. Watch the Dirty Dozen instead. Commence firing!