Whilst this sits within the cycle of big budget, all star action war films of the 1960s it is much different from, say, a film like The Great Escape (1963). The Dirty Dozen is a film about murder, there are no heroics, no redeeming characters and it borders on being somewhat nasty. From the opening scene of judicial execution to the climax of mass murder the film retains its controversiality as an action/adventure WW2 story. It is of course pure hokum and bears no relation to real combat in any sense, indeed its star Lee Marvin, a veteran of the war himself, declared it a load of nonsense. He plays a battle hardened officer, who on the approach to D-Day, is given the job to train twelve condemned men, all murderers and rapists, and lead them behind enemy lines to raid a French Chateau used by German officers and kill them in order to create confusion on the eve of the allied invasion. This ultimately necessitates the killing of unarmed men and their women by locking them in the cellar and setting off grenades after pouring petrol down the air shafts. The whole premise of the film is brutal and yet it gets away with it by the way the criminal soldiers are portrayed as victims of a system. With the exception of Telly Savalas, who plays a psychopath and nearly sabotages the mission, the rest are given excuses as to why they are condemned to death by court martial, even Marvin's role is that of a soldier who has broken the rules and is given the job as a punishment. Ultimately the sheer spectacle and characters makes for an entertaining film that is only marred when you stop to think about what is actually taking place. Director Robert Aldrich gives the whole thing a sense of fun even though it's a violent film and all bar one of the dozen die to give a final sense of justice. The survivor Charles Bronson is earlier given a moral justification for his crime and an aura of unfair conviction so he's allowed to live on. The cast are good and include Clint Walker, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy, John Cassavetes (who is excellent) and Donald Sutherland, whose career was launched from here. An interesting film that is worth analysing just to see how heroism was being defined by Hollywood at this time.
A bit slow to get into- The action does not start till right at the end, but Lee Marvin is great as always. Early film role for Donald Sutherland.