| Phil Kolas |
The Dirty Dozen plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, September 14th, through Tuesday, September 16th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
An ensemble masterpiece, where one dozen of the worst and most violent incarcerated American soldiers are offered a suicide mission in exchange for their freedom. A rotten deal from a rotten wartime government, offered to rotten men, to get them to kill the only type of people even worse than they are–NAZIS.
I was thinking just today, speaking with my yuck-em-up co-workers at my comedy show, about how much more fun art is when it’s big and stupid and loud while being coated over a pertinent social message—which as an aside is why we all picked comedy (“I don’t want to write a 700 page novel about a bunch of boring-ass people getting a divorce” I believe was my actual comparative statement, about why stand-up comedy is the superior mode of artistic expression). I believe this can all be classified under the “medicine with a piece of cheese” type of message delivery. If you make it fun, or funny, or loud, or bright etc. etc., you can get things to sink in to the audience, much better than if you just told them.
All that to say, The Dirty Dozen is one of the greatest pieces of cinematic cheese-wrapping, around one of the most pertinent social messages of the twentieth & (now because we didn’t learn the lesson hard enough) the twenty-first century: NAZIs and fascists will always suck, and anyone fighting them is The Good Guy. Philosophically, a simple premise, but one we’re apparently having trouble remembering. The Dirty Dozen plays a vital role in the delivery of this required social ethic.
Let’s begin with a few premises we all probably agree on (I do only have about 1500 words here):
- The Dirty Dozen rules (If you didn’t already think so, why are you reading this? Also get your shit together, this movie rules)
- Fascism and NAZIS are bad (You’re reading this, which means you’re literate, which means you’re probably neither of those things, good job you)
- A lot of Fascists are The Worst Dudes. They are dudes. They are whiny frightened cowardly little manly mongrels who mess their pants daily and need their bottoms pampered and their media fed to them in little spoons so they don’t hurt themselves.
For the interests of this essay, we’re going to concentrate on how this is a Male Problem. This is pertinent to mention, because this film has almost no Female Speaking lines. There is one German woman with lines, in German, whose only dialogue is calling for a Nazi dude to bone.
This is a misogynist film, designed to reach misogynist dudes, because they need to learn the lessons that this movie has for them. That is the first layer of cheese.
It’s important that you know, I’m not hand-waving all this like “Oh it was a different time.” No, the characters here are awful. They’re violent, simplistic, and dangerous men, incarcerated or otherwise. And as our real-world time continues to go on, “the good guys” in this movie will continue to age more and more poorly, and yet they will still, always be better dudes than the NAZIs they are killing in this movie. This is a remedial film, because apparently there are remedial minds out there who still need it.
“NAZIs bad. America good.”
And when is America goodest, Jethro?
“…when killing NAZIs?”
100%. Gold star.
I yearn for the day that The Dirty Dozen can fade into history’s sad and dusty pages and be forgotten, because we’ll have learned the lessons it had to teach us. But we haven’t, so it doesn’t.
So here we are, still watching The Dirty Dozen. And as medicine wrapped in cheese goes, we could do worse. This movie is funny, it’s fun, it has Lee Marvin being insubordinate, it has prostitutes being prostitutes (“I could only get eight, they’re like cops–when you need one you can’t find them”). It has guns, explosions, knives, punching, obstacle courses, and male bonding. The best homework is homework that doesn’t feel like homework.
My other favorite part of the Secret Homework Wrapped in Cheese for our students is in both how wonderfully underhanded AND overhanded it handles race. Not just in Jim Brown’s black character, but in every character in this Dirty Dozen Colors of the Rainbow Coalition. Greek, Spanish, Polish, Italian, and American Indian (played by a white dude in Redface—not great!) But this is all of course not directly mentioned in the text—about how America is only at its greatest strength when it lives and breathes on its racial diversity—because the people who need to know it will get very scared and sad and whiney if they have to hear it with words. So instead you sneak it in with guns and punching. Not only, obviously, by killing NAZIs. You can also see that Colonel Breed’s antagonist platoon from the American air-drop school are all White-White. Clean cut. Pure, one might say. And Dirty is something to be proud of in this movie, thank you very much.
The most important chess piece in this racial message (my favorite message in this film, that America’s greatest and infinite strength is when it welcomes in all the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to kill NAZIs), the man who bears the incredible thespian responsibility of playing a convincing and irredeemable asshole, one of the most repugnant cinematic villains I’ve ever seen in movie history, the Judas who must act or we have no counterfoil with which to make our point of racial unity in service of killing Fascists and the righteousness thereof, we have Archer Maggott, played by Telly Savalas with such incredible visceral and evil aplomb that it would not be matched for 45 years until Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained. Archer Maggott, the role turned down by Jack Palance because the director refused to give the character a redemption arc where he “learned his lesson.” Apparently director Robert Aldrich believed some Americans don’t deserve to be invited back. Once you call Jim Brown the n-word, you don’t get to patch that up. And see the clear metaphorical equivalence made in the film, with one scene where Maggott relaxes and plays catch with himself with a grenade, while lying in a palatial king-sized bed in a NAZI chateau. Make yourself at home, Maggott, you fit right in! And all the while throughout the movie before that point, with the incessant religious haranguing from the character, at all times and every opportunity, it’s all a very clear message that Fascists can grow quite easily in local American soil—that the NAZIs who claim to be atheist can have more than enough in common with an American-born Christian. This is symbolically proven most completely when the shooting starts, that Maggott is also the first one shot and killed by a Dirty Dozen-er: Maggott deserves to die in this mausoleum just like the rest of those racist scum.
There are other, greater, and even more beautiful themes and subtleties in this masterpiece. Cinema things are going on that can teach you about the union solidarity of communism, and who holds the power of death (first used as a threat against the Dozen, then stolen by the Dozen as The Power of Desperation & its Leverage—if they’re going to die anyway why do they have to follow your orders?) But that is all pretentiousness from a philosophy major. That would all be gilding the lily. The central message, and the exploding cheese around it, is already perfect for those who must learn it. There is no “greater message” behind the Front Message of the film, because it is already the Greatest Message—kill NAZIs, get out of prison. Don’t be a fascist, be the good guys.
Who are the Good Guys?
Anyone who’s not a Fascist.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon