Aldrich once again takes a genre by the scruff of the neck and shakes new life into it. With Kiss Me Deadly he made the detective in Film Noir the most unlikeable character in the movie and now with The Dirty Dozen he make the soldiers convicted killers, rapists, and robbers.
Aldrich assembled an up and coming cast, including Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, and John Cassavettes alongside hollywood veterans such as Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Robert Ryan. None of the characters are lost amongst such an all-star cast such is the construction of the film into three distinct sections: the initial recruitment and training, the war games(later copied by Private Benjamin), and the final suicide mission.
Aldrich skilfully uses the first two acts to invite the audience to pick their favourites and build an emotional attachment to members of the Dozen. He banked on everyone having one or two characters they liked the best and then uses the final act to kill the vast majority of… more »

Aldrich once again takes a genre by the scruff of the neck and shakes new life into it. With Kiss Me Deadly he made the detective in Film Noir the most unlikeable character in the movie and now with The Dirty Dozen he make the soldiers convicted killers, rapists, and robbers.
Aldrich assembled an up and coming cast, including Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, and John Cassavettes alongside hollywood veterans such as Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Robert Ryan. None of the characters are lost amongst such an all-star cast such is the construction of the film into three distinct sections: the initial recruitment and training, the war games(later copied by Private Benjamin), and the final suicide mission.
Aldrich skilfully uses the first two acts to invite the audience to pick their favourites and build an emotional attachment to members of the Dozen. He banked on everyone having one or two characters they liked the best and then uses the final act to kill the vast majority of them off. As this process intensifies all normal genre expectations are confounded by the sheer level of the slaughter of so many well defined characters. To compound the audiences' trauma, Aldrich has a roll call at the end with the faces of all the dead smiling on the screen. Now that's a movie.