cult film freak: ROBERT ALDRICH'S WAR MISSION ENSEMBLE OF 'THE DIRTY DOZEN'

Charles Bronson and Jim Brown in THE DIRTY DOZEN Year: 1967 Rating: ***1/2

Both THE GREAT ESCAPE and THE DIRTY DOZEN have a lot in common yet are completely different as World War II adventure films... the first has a group of POW's escaping from the Germans while the second involves American convicts training to enter Germany, as both somewhat awkwardly balance comedy with drama, and, while entertaining popcorn time-fillers, they're predictably and painfully mainstream...

While ESCAPE centered on many men hoping to tunnel out, only a handful are centered on, which happens with DOZEN: but THE DIRTY HALF-DOZEN lacks the catchy alliteration...

Lee Marvin in THE DIRTY DOZEN

And we only center on that many of the death-row inmates — all promised full pardons if they complete a borderline suicide-mission by sneaking into a German castle to kill Nazi officers and their women...

Yet the true star is of course the leader, Lee Marvin, given the task by upward military brass (including a horribly cliche Robert Ryan) while igniting a career of strong-silent-leads after decades of playing the kind of mouthy, offbeat, vicious thugs who work for him here...

Charles Bronson, Clint Walker, Donald Sutherland & Jim Brown in THE DIRTY DOZEN

Including two characters very much alike, and not all that bad, in Charles Bronson and Jim Brown, both hardly guilty in the first place, contrasting with genuinely dangerous scoundrels like Telly Savalas as a born-again psychopath and overall scene-stealer John Cassavetes as Franco, who, through constant complaints, has even Marvin admitting to cohort Ralph Meeker "I love Franco" for bringing the men together...

Most of the humor occurs during the first half at the makeshift mission-training boot camp and war games, also including Donald Sutherland as the token dumbbell, just clever enough to pull off a truly hilarious moment of impersonating a General — almost as if he'd seen enough war movies to parody them...

John Cassavetes and Clint Walker in THE DIRTY DOZEN

Meanwhile gentle-giant Clint Walker's the strongest, most humble and extremely likeable, yet we never actually learn his fate, representing the biggest problem of an epic cut into two overlong halves: the first getting comfortable with these characters, and the second practically losing them altogether in a mission too darkly-lit and strategically convoluted for the audience to properly keep score...

Then, at the very end, Cassavetes celebrates surviving... until he doesn't... and the fact only straight-laced citizens Marvin, Bronson and military camp counselor Richard Jaekel remain alive underlines how director Robert Aldrich ultimately fails to genuinely develop his flawed yet endearing anti-heroes — maybe if DOZEN came out a decade later, there'd be far more DIRTY realism instead of what feels like your father's movie... even when it first came out.