The Dirty Dozen [Blu-ray]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Director Robert Aldrich took what he considered a hopelessly old-fashioned script by Lukas Heller and Nunnally Johnson and fashioned The Dirty Dozen into one of MGM's biggest moneymakers of the 1960s--and the sixth highest-grossing film in the studio's history. Lee Marvin plays Major Reisman, assigned to coordinate a suicide mission on a French chateau held by top Nazi officers. Since no "normal" GI can be expected to volunteer for this mission, Reisman is compelled to draw his personnel from a group of military prisoners serving life sentences. This "dirty dozen" includes a sex pervert (Telly Savalas), a psycho (John Cassavetes), a retarded killer (Donald Sutherland), and the equally malevolent Charles Bronson, Trini Lopez, Jim Brown, and Clint Walker. On the dim promise of receiving pardons if they survive, the criminals undergo a brutal training program, then are marched behind enemy lines dressed as Nazi soldiers, the better to overtake the chateau and kill everyone in it--including the innocent wives and mistresses of the German officers. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Number of Discs: 1
• Subtitle: Eng/Fre/Spa
• Audio: Dolby Digital Mono
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 (Theatre Wide Screen)
• Features:
  • Bonus movie The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission
  • Commentary by cast members Jim Brown, Trini Lopez, Stuart Cooper, and Colin Maitland, producer Kenneth Hyman, original novelist E.M. Nathanson, film historian David J. Schow and the Veteran Military Advisor to Movies Capt. Dale Dye
  • Introduction by Ernest Borgnine
  • 2 exiting new documentaries:
  • Armed and Deadly: The Making of The Dirty Dozen
  • The Filthy Thirteen: Real Stories From Behind the Lines
  • Marine Corps Combat Leadership Skills: vintage recruitment documentary featuring Lee Marvin
  • Vintage featurette Operation Dirty Dozen
  • Soundtrack remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1
  • Theatrical trailer

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Won Best Sound Effects - 1967 (John Poyner)
•     Nominated Best Editing - 1967 (Michael Luciano)
•     Nominated Best Supporting Actor - 1967 (John Cassavetes)

• Directors Guild of America

•     Nominated Best Director - 1967 (Robert Aldrich)

• Hollywood Foreign Press Association

•     Nominated Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Pictu - 1967 (John Cassavetes)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Lee Marvin - Maj. Reisman
       Ernest Borgnine - Gen. Worden
       Charles Bronson - Joseph Wladislaw
       Jim Brown - Robert Jefferson
       John Cassavetes - Victor Franko
       George Kennedy - Maj. Max Armbruster
       Richard Jaeckel - Sgt. Bowren
       Robert Ryan - Col. Everett Dasher-Breed
       Trini Lopez - Pedro Jiminez
       Ralph Meeker - Capt. Stuart Kinder
       Telly Savalas - Archer Maggott
       Clint Walker - Samson Posey
       Donald Sutherland - Vernon Pinkley
       Robert Webber - Gen. Denton
       Tom Busby - Milo Vladek
       Ben Carruthers - Glenn Gilpin
       Stuart Cooper - Roscoe Lever
       Robert Phillips - Corporal Carl Morgan
       Colin Maitland - Seth Sawyer
       Al Mancini - Tassos Bravos
       Thick Wilson - Worden's Aide
       Dora Reisser - German Officer's Girl
       Dick Miller
       George Roubicek - Pvt. Arthur James Gardner

• Director:

  Robert Aldrich

• Producer:

  Kenneth Hyman

• Screenwriter:

  Lukas Heller, Nunnally Johnson

• Book Author:

  E.M. Nathanson

• Cinematographer:

  Edward Scaife

• Songwriter:

  Mack David

• Composer (Music Score):

  Frank De Vol

• Songwriter:

  Sibylle Siegfreid

• Editor:

  Michael Luciano

• Art Director:

  W.E. Hutchinson, William Hutchinson

• Makeup:

  Ernest Gasser, Wally Schneiderman

• Special Effects:

  Cliff John Richardson

• First Assistant Director:

  Bert Batt

• Camera Operator:

  Tony Spratling, Alan McCabe

REVIEW:

• 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, Rovi