BIG SCREEN CLASSICS: THE DIRTY DOZEN
Mon. Aug. 17 and Wed. Aug. 19, RITZ
Buy your tickets here.
Start getting your war on this week in preparation for INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS with the granddaddy of all "guys on a mission" movies. This is the big one. Twelve seventeen foot tall men of iron who don't like playing by the rules versus the Thousand Year Reich and its despicable toadies.
If THE DIRTY DOZEN were a lesser movie, it would merely be about Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland and Charles Bronson killing a bunch of Nazis, and that would be okay. But THE DIRTY DOZEN was directed by Robert Aldrich, not only Hollywood's supreme master of intelligent genre films, but a huge liberal who managed to make one of the most subversive films of its time. In 1967, in the middle of the Vietnam war, he shot one the biggest anti-war films ever made in Hollywood, fiercely critical of the military, authority figures of all kinds and the barbaric nature of war. All of this was done in the guise of a supposedly gung-ho action film that definitely gave audiences what they were looking for, but sure as hell didn't make them feel good about it. Not that THE DIRTY DOZEN is a downer - it's a hell of a lot of fun - but the director made sure it was understood that war itself is a criminal act that degrades us all. The fact that it was a huge hit (#1 film of 1967!) spoke well of the intelligence of audiences, but the fact that it's a big screen classic is proof positive that Aldrich was a one-of-a-kind cinematic master whose films will resonate forever.
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