Alphabetical movie - The Dirty Dozen
Embarassed admission of a film geek - this was only the second time I'd watched The Dirty Dozen. The first time was about a year ago. The most I knew about the film was that Tom Hanks' character in Sleepless in Seattle cried at the end of it.
Well OK. I knew it was a WWII "mission film" and it featured a pretty impressive cast that included Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes and Donald Sutherland. And that most of the characters were criminals recruited for a suicide mission.
OK, I knew a lot about the film. It is one of those cultural touchstones that film geeks just "know." It isn't spoken of in the reverential tones reserved for The Seven Samurai or Citizen Kane. Rather it is one of those films that inspires the excited banter about the badass classic film actors like McQueen, Marvin and Bronson.
The film clearly inspires a ton of modern pop culture from Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle to Tarantino in Inglorious Basterds to The A-Team. It is packed with so much testosterone, anyone watching it - male or female - will probably need a shave once the movie is over.
It's also pretty decent storytelling.
When folks talk about how it is a "mission" film, they forget that the mission takes up only about 1/3 of the film. It occurred to someone that if you are going to send a bunch of guys into a nearly impossible situation, you might just want the audience to care about them a little bit.
When I'm watching a Hayes era film, I can't forget the fact that "bad" characters are going to pay for their actions. The guys in The Dirty Dozen are, by and large, murderers. They would not be allowed to survive. A strict moral code demanded it.
I would imagine audiences of the time had at least a subconscious knowledge of the consequences any morally "wrong" character would face. They had to know that these guys didn't stand a chance because the movies literally would not let them live.
Under those circumstances, getting someone to care about these guys is a monumental task. Sure, you can make one guy sort of a lovable brute who killed someone by accident and have another guy appear to be wrongly accused but there are a dozen of 'em and not all of 'em can be "innocent."
So what has to happen is you have to introduce these guys in a way that makes them look pretty bad, find a way to make them look like they are decent people who lost their way and then jam a knife into your audience's heart by killing most of them off.
I hope that wasn't a spoiler. I figure that any spoilers on a film over 40 years old are your fault and not mine.
The mission at the end is what most people talk about and yet if there hadn't been so much time spent getting us to care about the guys on the mission, we wouldn't care so much about the situation. In a remarkable twist, I find there is a point near the end of the film where I no longer care about the success of the mission - I care about whether or not the guys are going to get out of there. In fact, I find that it becomes one of those films I watch hoping it'll end a different way this time.
One has to admit - if they could make Tom Hanks cry, they managed to do exactly what they set out to do.
Next up, one of my very favorite movies of all time - The Dish!!