The Dirty Dozen
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50 free The Dirty Dozen trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Released in 1967, The Dirty Dozen took a simple, disreputable idea, a squad of condemned army prisoners offered a way out through a desperate wartime raid, and turned it into one of the biggest hits of its decade. Its gallows humor, its contempt for authority and its brutal final act upset plenty of critics at the time, and audiences have been arguing about it ever since. This quiz covers the whole operation: the prisoners and the officers who train them, the turns of the plot from the training camp to the final assault, the stars in front of the camera and the people behind it, the real wartime unit that fed the legend, and the sequels, tributes and imitators that followed. It is written for war-movie fans and classic film buffs alike. The early questions are friendly to anyone who has seen the film once; the later ones reward viewers who know the credits, the production stories and the long afterlife of the film.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Cleveland running back announced his retirement from football during the making of The Dirty Dozen?
Jim Brown
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.
Q 02Which real unit of hard-drinking American paratroopers inspired the novel behind The Dirty Dozen?
The Filthy Thirteen
The Filthy Thirteen were demolition specialists, not convicts, though their brawling and scorn for authority often landed them in the stockade.
Q 03Which Western star turned down the lead in The Dirty Dozen, objecting to adultery in the script?
John Wayne
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.
Q 04In the sequel The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, the convicts must kill a general plotting to assassinate whom?
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler has to be kept alive, the Allied generals reason, because a more capable leader taking his place could prolong the war.
Q 05Which DC Comics team of jailed supervillains was revived in the 1980s on a premise echoing The Dirty Dozen?
Suicide Squad
Suicide Squad swaps military convicts for costumed criminals, and director David Ayer described his film version as the Dirty Dozen with super villains.
Q 06In which Tom Hanks romantic comedy do two men fake tears while describing the plot of The Dirty Dozen?
Sleepless in Seattle
Sleepless in Seattle has Hanks and Victor Garber improvise the routine to tease a woman who has just wept over An Affair to Remember.
Q 07The Dirty Dozen follows a raid into occupied France, but in which country was the film actually shot?
England
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.
Q 08Who plays Major Reisman, the officer who trains the convicts in The Dirty Dozen?
Lee Marvin
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.
Q 09Which actor plays the convict who enters the château disguised as a German officer in The Dirty Dozen?
Charles Bronson
Charles Bronson, born Charles Buchinsky in a Pennsylvania coal town, served as a B-29 aerial gunner in 1945 before he ever acted.
Q 10Which actor plays Maggott, the murderous religious fanatic among the convicts in The Dirty Dozen?
Telly Savalas
Telly Savalas came back for two 1980s TV sequels, but as a different character: Major Wright, the officer leading a fresh batch of convicts.
Q 11Which future M*A*S*H film star plays Pinkley, the convict who impersonates a general, in The Dirty Dozen?
Donald Sutherland
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.
Q 12Which actor plays General Worden, who orders the convict mission in The Dirty Dozen?
Ernest Borgnine
Ernest Borgnine, a real Navy veteran of the Second World War, returned as Worden in all three of the 1980s TV sequels.
Q 13Which pioneer of independent film earned an Oscar nomination as the defiant convict Franko in The Dirty Dozen?
John Cassavetes
Q 21Which code name covers the covert plan to turn Army convicts into commandos in The Dirty Dozen?
Project Amnesty
Project Amnesty is named for the bargain behind it: any convict who lives through the mission is promised an amnesty for his crimes.
Q 22During The Dirty Dozen's war games, the convicts capture Colonel Breed's headquarters after commandeering what?
An ambulance
An ambulance with Red Cross markings lets them pose as medics delivering a wounded soldier, and they take the rival command post at gunpoint.
Q 23Colonel Breed, Major Reisman's rival in The Dirty Dozen, commands paratroopers from which US Army unit?
101st Airborne
John Cassavetes later earned Oscar nominations for writing Faces and for directing A Woman Under the Influence, giving him nods in three different crafts.
Q 14Which actor turned down Maggott when The Dirty Dozen's makers would not cut the character's racism?
Jack Palance
Jack Palance wanted the script rewritten so the character shed his bigotry, and when the filmmakers refused he gave up the part.
Q 15Which singer plays the convict Jimenez and performs a song on screen in The Dirty Dozen?
Trini Lopez
Trini Lopez performed The Bramble Bush on screen but left the shoot early, so his character dies off-camera during the parachute drop.
Q 16George Kennedy, The Dirty Dozen's Major Armbruster, won an Oscar for which other 1967 film, starring Paul Newman?
Cool Hand Luke
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.
Q 17Clint Walker, the towering Posey of The Dirty Dozen, was already famous as the star of which TV Western?
Cheyenne
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.
Q 18Which convict is the only member of The Dirty Dozen to make it back alive from the château raid?
Joseph Wladislaw
Joseph Wladislaw escapes alongside Major Reisman and a single military policeman, then is pardoned and offered the chance to resume his army service.
Q 19The Dirty Dozen's raid is meant to throw German commanders into chaos just before which Allied operation?
The Normandy landings
The Normandy landings are only weeks away in the story, which opens in March 1944 with the major handed a highly classified assignment.
Q 20The château full of German officers that The Dirty Dozen are sent to attack stands near which French city?
Rennes
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.
101st Airborne was also the division of the real demolition squad whose wartime exploits fed the novel behind the film.
Q 24How do the convicts in The Dirty Dozen memorize every step of the plan for attacking the château?
A numbered rhyme
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.
Q 25Major Reisman, who trains The Dirty Dozen, is an officer of which wartime American intelligence agency?
The OSS
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.
Q 26Which director made The Dirty Dozen and used his share of its profits to buy his own studio?
Robert Aldrich
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.
Q 27The Dirty Dozen earned four Academy Award nominations but won only one, in which category?
Best Sound Effects
Best Sound Effects went to John Poyner, while the film's nominations for editing, sound and a supporting performance all came up short.
Q 28Which Quentin Tarantino film borrows its title from an Italian war movie that loosely remade The Dirty Dozen?
Inglourious Basterds
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.
Q 29Which 1998 Joe Dante film cast veterans of The Dirty Dozen as the voices of its toy commandos?
Small Soldiers
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.
Q 30Which Clint Eastwood war caper of 1970 reunited two of the actors who played convicts in The Dirty Dozen?
Kelly's Heroes
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.