The Dirty Dozen

Twelve soldiers under sentence of death or life imprisonment are offered a deal: kill German officers at a château in France before the Normandy landings, and any survivor is pardoned. The first half is the training, the second is the mission. Robert Aldrich directed, from E. M. Nathanson's novel. Lee Marvin assembles the unit, with Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes, Ernest Borgnine and Jim Brown among them. Brown announced his retirement from professional football during the shoot. Filming took place in the UK in the summer of 1966, and building the château gave the production trouble. Its most memorable device is a memory aid: the actors recite the details of the attack in a rhyming chant, which keeps their parts straight and teaches the audience the plan at the same time. It opened on 15 June 1967 and grossed around 45.3 million dollars against a 5.4 million budget, winning the Academy Award for Best Sound Effects. The reviews split, some praising the entertainment and others attacking the violence. Who it is for: viewers who like mission films and hard sixties American cinema. Who it is not for: anyone expecting heroism. The burning of the people in the cellar was argued about on release and it is still ugly.