Not A Real War Movie, But A Perfect One

Rating: 10/10 (10 February 2016)

When I was 10 I went to Romania over the summer (even though I would've rather been in America) right before communism fell. Predictably, there wasn't much variety in the offerings on TV. But sometimes they would show older movies in the evening, probably because those were perceived as having less political impact. This was my exposure to "The Dirty Dozen", and what a fond memory. I'd always wanted to see that movie again, and recently re-watched it in full at age 31.
Although dated, I still have to describe it as a perfect film. That is, the only criticism I could level at this film is that the dialogue seems a bit hokey by today's standards. But that's made up for by excellent character acting (at least from the leads: Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson) with a dignity but also a restraint you rarely if ever see in today's movies. Now let's talk about the movie itself. Lee Marvin plays an American major in WW2 Britain who has to turn 12 felons into a commando unit and lead them to infiltrate a château occupied by Nazi generals, who are to be killed.
When I saw this as a kid, I thought it was an extremely cool war movie. Seeing it as an adult, it's clear that most of the events could never happen in real life, and it's meant more as a fantasy. For instance, Lee Marvin is a rebel, who resents having a straight-laced Colonel poking around his business. So at some point he fires a machine gun in the direction of the Colonel. Of course he would get imprisoned for that, maybe sentenced to death. And he hires prostitutes for the soldiers. Maybe that could happen in real life, but it seems to me both an act of compassion for men who are about to die (who are forced to live a monastic lifestyle even as they sacrifice themselves) as well as an indictment by the filmmaker of the way women are often treated as objects in times of war.
That's the beauty of this movie: the heroes are no angels--yet it never moralistically bashes you in the head with that fact. In particular, Lee Marvin's Major is simultaneously the most heroic and the most brutal/cold-blooded character in the film. He's heroic because he does what he needs to do to discipline his men into commandos, in a manner that's sometimes tough, though never sadistic. His brutality becomes apparent in the climax, possibly one of the most thought-provoking action scenes a WWII movie. We think of the Nazis as monstrous serial killers, but here the Major's mission is to actually murder generals, rather than taking them as POWs. This is an expedient solution, yet it's a war crime, and wouldn't have been done as such either by the Allies or the Nazis. It's relevant to keep in mind that most Nazi generals were not convicted as war criminals, though many probably turned a blind eye to much that was going on.
After a lot of fighting, the Major traps not only the generals, but also the women who were with them, in a bomb shelter, and maniacally pours grenades and gasoline through the vents, to set the château ablaze. He, however, had let the French go (could he not have also released the German women?) I think this scene might be an allegory for the fire-bombing of Dresden. What's so compelling is that, as he keeps taking time to pour more gasoline, more and more of his team keep getting sniped. He does not take on the responsibility of setting off the blaze himself, but delegates that duty to one of his men, who then gets sniped.
All in all: completely exciting and action-packed. Impossible to describe in this brief blurb. Well worth watching!