The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen is remembered today as a fine action-adventure film, along the lines and proportions of The Great Escape and Kelly's Heroes. In its time, it was also a groundbreaking piece of popular cinema. Until its release, Hollywood had struggled with how to portray men in war, especially World War II. Movies such as The Naked and the Dead, Attack, and Between Heaven and Hell had tried to present the reality that not every American soldier, or even most, were bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, flag-waving patriots; but those movies never caught on with the public, and one extreme example, Carl Foreman's The Victors, was a box-office disaster. The Dirty Dozen succeeded at presenting the darker sides of humanity, employed in the service of good. It broke lots of lingering screen taboos, showing its heroes cavorting with prostitutes and killing with very little discrimination, and it generally held all authority in contempt -- pretty strong stuff for a mainstream movie coming out in the midst of the Vietnam War. It did for the war movie what Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Sergio Leone's Man-With-No-Name trilogy did for the Western, while retaining just enough roughhousing fun to hang on to more traditional audiences, thus yielding a box-office bonanza for its producers and opening more conservative audience members to further films in this vein. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide