50 Fun Facts About The Dirty Dozen

Which Cleveland running back announced his retirement from football during the making of The Dirty Dozen?

Jim Brown was already the NFL's all-time leading rusher when his team's owner told him to choose between football and acting. He was thirty, and he picked the film.

Which real unit of hard-drinking American paratroopers inspired the novel behind The Dirty Dozen?

The Filthy Thirteen were demolition specialists, not convicts, though their brawling and scorn for authority often landed them in the stockade.

Which Western star turned down the lead in The Dirty Dozen, objecting to adultery in the script?

John Wayne disliked a subplot in the original script in which the major has an affair with a married woman whose husband is away fighting.

In the sequel The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, the convicts must kill a general plotting to assassinate whom?

Adolf Hitler has to be kept alive, the Allied generals reason, because a more capable leader taking his place could prolong the war.

Which DC Comics team of jailed supervillains was revived in the 1980s on a premise echoing The Dirty Dozen?

Suicide Squad swaps military convicts for costumed criminals, and director David Ayer described his film version as the Dirty Dozen with super villains.

In which Tom Hanks romantic comedy do two men fake tears while describing the plot of The Dirty Dozen?

Sleepless in Seattle has Hanks and Victor Garber improvise the routine to tease a woman who has just wept over An Affair to Remember.

The Dirty Dozen follows a raid into occupied France, but in which country was the film actually shot?

England supplied every location in the summer of 1966, and the French château the convicts storm was a set built on a studio lot at Borehamwood.

Who plays Major Reisman, the officer who trains the convicts in The Dirty Dozen?

Lee Marvin knew combat first-hand: he served as a Marine scout sniper in the Pacific and was wounded during the Battle of Saipan in 1944.

Which actor plays the convict who enters the château disguised as a German officer in The Dirty Dozen?

Charles Bronson, born Charles Buchinsky in a Pennsylvania coal town, served as a B-29 aerial gunner in 1945 before he ever acted.

Which actor plays Maggott, the murderous religious fanatic among the convicts in The Dirty Dozen?

Telly Savalas came back for two 1980s TV sequels, but as a different character: Major Wright, the officer leading a fresh batch of convicts.

Which future M*A*S*H film star plays Pinkley, the convict who impersonates a general, in The Dirty Dozen?

Donald Sutherland got the scene only after a co-star refused it as demeaning to his own character, and the film became the Canadian's breakthrough.

Which actor plays General Worden, who orders the convict mission in The Dirty Dozen?

Ernest Borgnine, a real Navy veteran of the Second World War, returned as Worden in all three of the 1980s TV sequels.

Which pioneer of independent film earned an Oscar nomination as the defiant convict Franko in The Dirty Dozen?

John Cassavetes later earned Oscar nominations for writing Faces and for directing A Woman Under the Influence, giving him nods in three different crafts.

Which actor turned down Maggott when The Dirty Dozen's makers would not cut the character's racism?

Jack Palance wanted the script rewritten so the character shed his bigotry, and when the filmmakers refused he gave up the part.

Which singer plays the convict Jimenez and performs a song on screen in The Dirty Dozen?

Trini Lopez performed The Bramble Bush on screen but left the shoot early, so his character dies off-camera during the parachute drop.

George Kennedy, The Dirty Dozen's Major Armbruster, won an Oscar for which other 1967 film, starring Paul Newman?

Cool Hand Luke brought Kennedy the Best Supporting Actor award as Dragline, a chain-gang prisoner who fights the new arrival and then comes to idolize him.

Clint Walker, the towering Posey of The Dirty Dozen, was already famous as the star of which TV Western?

Cheyenne ran from 1955 to 1962 with the 6-foot-6 Walker as Cheyenne Bodie, a wandering cowboy written as a physically huge man with a gentle spirit.

Which convict is the only member of The Dirty Dozen to make it back alive from the château raid?

Joseph Wladislaw escapes alongside Major Reisman and a single military policeman, then is pardoned and offered the chance to resume his army service.

The Dirty Dozen's raid is meant to throw German commanders into chaos just before which Allied operation?

The Normandy landings are only weeks away in the story, which opens in March 1944 with the major handed a highly classified assignment.

The château full of German officers that The Dirty Dozen are sent to attack stands near which French city?

Rennes is the nearest city to the fictional château, where senior Wehrmacht officers gather with their guests and can all be caught under one roof.

Which code name covers the covert plan to turn Army convicts into commandos in The Dirty Dozen?

Project Amnesty is named for the bargain behind it: any convict who lives through the mission is promised an amnesty for his crimes.

During The Dirty Dozen's war games, the convicts capture Colonel Breed's headquarters after commandeering what?

An ambulance with Red Cross markings lets them pose as medics delivering a wounded soldier, and they take the rival command post at gunpoint.

Colonel Breed, Major Reisman's rival in The Dirty Dozen, commands paratroopers from which US Army unit?

101st Airborne was also the division of the real demolition squad whose wartime exploits fed the novel behind the film.

How do the convicts in The Dirty Dozen memorize every step of the plan for attacking the château?

A numbered rhyme of sixteen lines tells each man his job in order, and the squad chants it together on the way to the target.

Major Reisman, who trains The Dirty Dozen, is an officer of which wartime American intelligence agency?

The OSS was America's wartime espionage and sabotage service, and part of its work passed to the CIA when that agency was created in 1947.

Which director made The Dirty Dozen and used his share of its profits to buy his own studio?

Robert Aldrich sold his share of the film's profits for $1.35 million and used the money to buy his own studio, a dream he had held for years.

The Dirty Dozen earned four Academy Award nominations but won only one, in which category?

Best Sound Effects went to John Poyner, while the film's nominations for editing, sound and a supporting performance all came up short.

Which Quentin Tarantino film borrows its title from an Italian war movie that loosely remade The Dirty Dozen?

Inglourious Basterds takes its misspelled name from Enzo G. Castellari's The Inglorious Bastards, a men-on-a-mission film made in the earlier hit's image.

Which 1998 Joe Dante film cast veterans of The Dirty Dozen as the voices of its toy commandos?

Small Soldiers gave four of the war film's stars new orders as the Commando Elite, a squad of action figures including a sniper and a demolitions man.

Which Clint Eastwood war caper of 1970 reunited two of the actors who played convicts in The Dirty Dozen?

Kelly's Heroes put one former convict in a Sherman tank as the hippie commander Oddball and made the other a gruff master sergeant called Big Joe.

Which critic, in his first year as a newspaper film reviewer, mocked the violence of The Dirty Dozen?

Roger Ebert wrote sarcastically that Chicago's censors, so strict about sex on screen, had waved through the film's sadism and brutality.

The Dirty Dozen is adapted from a bestselling 1965 war novel by which author?

E. M. Nathanson had heard a wartime legend about a unit of convicts sent into combat, found no trace of one in Army archives, and wrote the story as fiction.

Which James Bond film kept The Dirty Dozen off the top of the US box office until its sixth week?

You Only Live Twice held it to second place on Variety's weekly survey, even as the war film took in rentals of $7.5 million in five weeks, one of the fastest starts of its day.

The real paratroopers who inspired The Dirty Dozen became famous for wearing war paint and which haircut?

Mohawks were the idea of the squad's part-Choctaw sergeant, Jake McNiece, who wanted to honor his heritage and fire the men up for the dangers ahead.

Which studio bought The Dirty Dozen as an unpublished outline and saw the film become its biggest hit of 1967?

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer secured the rights in 1963, two years before the novel reached bookshops, beating the film's eventual director to them.

Which veteran screenwriter of The Grapes of Wrath co-wrote The Dirty Dozen's script with Lukas Heller?

Nunnally Johnson had been Oscar-nominated for adapting John Steinbeck's novel back in 1940, and he also worked as a producer and director.

What caused months of delays and about $1 million in overruns while The Dirty Dozen was being filmed?

Heavy rain fell throughout the summer of 1966, and part of the château set also caught fire before the cameras were ready to destroy it.

The Dirty Dozen's director later put convicts on a football field in which 1974 prison comedy-drama?

The Longest Yard stars Burt Reynolds as a former NFL player who recruits a team of fellow prisoners for a game against their own guards.

Which future Mad Men star had an early role as Private Leeds in the 1988 TV series of The Dirty Dozen?

John Slattery was almost two decades away from playing ad man Roger Sterling when he joined the short-lived series as a young soldier.

Which composer of The Dirty Dozen's score also wrote the theme tune for The Brady Bunch?

Frank De Vol also scored Kiss Me Deadly and The Flight of the Phoenix, yet he is best recognized for sitcom themes such as My Three Sons.

Which publisher launched Combat Kelly and the Deadly Dozen in 1972, a comic inspired by The Dirty Dozen?

Marvel Comics spun the series off from Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, but it folded after only nine issues.

What were the real paratroopers behind The Dirty Dozen ordered to secure or destroy on their famous mission?

Bridges over the Douve River were the objective, and although half the squad was killed, wounded or captured on the jump, the rest carried it out.

Which 1970 war film by The Dirty Dozen's director was described as a kind of sequel to the earlier hit?

Too Late the Hero got made because ABC wanted another war picture in the same vein, so the director revived a patrol story he had nursed since 1959.

Which military police sergeant, played by Richard Jaeckel, is the only guard to survive The Dirty Dozen's raid?

Bowren starts out as the convicts' jailer and ends up fighting alongside them, and Jaeckel played him again in the 1985 TV sequel.

Which officer psychoanalyzes the convicts in The Dirty Dozen and warns that Maggott is the most dangerous?

Captain Kinder also cautions Major Reisman that at least seven of the twelve would probably kill him if they were given the chance.

Which CHiPs motorcycle cop joined the convicts in the 1988 TV sequel The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission?

Erik Estrada played Carmine D'Agostino, one of a new dozen sent to stop a group of top Nazis from organizing a Fourth Reich.

The American Film Institute ranked The Dirty Dozen 65th on which of its 100 Years lists in 2001?

100 Thrills counted down the most exciting movies in American cinema, with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho taking first place.

Which character shoots Maggott dead after the fanatic opens fire on his own comrades in The Dirty Dozen?

Jefferson stops him, but too late: the gunfire has already alerted the German officers, who retreat with their guests to a locked shelter underground.

Which American network aired a short-lived television series based on The Dirty Dozen in 1988?

Fox broadcast the show with Ben Murphy in the lead, after TV-movie sequels in 1985 and 1987 had brought the convict-commando idea back.

Which 1964 Roger Corman film sent convicts on a hazardous wartime mission three years before The Dirty Dozen?

The Secret Invasion also promises a pardon to any convict who survives: its five criminals are recruited to rescue an Italian general sympathetic to the Allies.