The Dirty Dozen (1967) on Netflix
NR19672h 30mActionAdventureThriller
Major John Reisman is ordered to turn twelve convicted American soldiers into commandos for a raid on a château near Rennes where German officers are quartered. Survivors earn a pardon.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In March 1944, Major General Sam Worden gives Major John Reisman a top secret assignment known as Project Amnesty: take twelve of the Army's worst convicts and train them as commandos. Their target is a château near Rennes where Wehrmacht officers are quartered, and destroying it would disrupt German command before the Normandy landings. Reisman meets the men at a military prison run by the Military Police Corps. Franko, Wladislaw, Jefferson, Posey and Maggott are condemned to death for murder; the others face lengthy sentences. Sergeant Bowren serves as Reisman's second in command, and Captain Kinder examines the convicts. Colonel Everett Dasher Breed, Reisman's nemesis, commands the parachute training facility and tries to discover what the mission is.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The part of Major Reisman was first offered to John Wayne, who turned it down: the original script had the character conducting an affair with an Englishwoman whose husband was away fighting on the Continent, and Wayne objected to the adultery.
- Jack Palance refused the role of Archer Maggot because the filmmakers would not rewrite the script to have the character lose his racism. Telly Savalas took the part instead.
- The scene in which a convict impersonates a visiting general was written for Clint Walker. When Walker said he thought it demeaning to his character, who was a Native American, Aldrich handed the bit to Donald Sutherland instead.
- While the film was being made, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell demanded that Jim Brown choose between football and acting. Brown, who was thirty and already the NFL's all-time leading rusher, chose acting and retired from the sport.
- The fake chateau was built so solidly that blowing it up, as the script required, would have taken 70 tons of explosives. The crew gave up on that and destroyed a cork and plastic section of it instead.
- The chateau set was meant to be destroyed on camera, but part of it burned down ahead of schedule. Night filming had been stopped at 03:30 on 21 September 1966 because of fog, and the set caught fire at 06:29 that morning.
- E. M. Nathanson wrote in the prologue to his novel that he had only heard a legend that such a unit existed, and had been told wrongly that its men were convicts. He could find no corroboration at all in the archives of the US Army in Europe.
- The Detroit hip-hop group D12, who also call themselves the Dirty Dozen, took their name from this film without having seen it. They were under the impression that it was a Western.
