In the weeks leading up to the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, Major John Reisman (Lee Marvin), an OSS officer who could probably win the war single handedly, but has nothing but contempt for his commanding officers, arrives at a military prison in England to witness the hanging of a condemned U.S. soldier.

Reisman is then summoned to meet with a general played by Ernest Borgnine, who “volunteers” the major for a mission in which he’ll take twelve American prisoners – men guilty of capital offenses from murder to rape to grand theft – train them, parachute them into France and assault a chateau that serves as a retreat for senior German officers.

The rabble given to him include Franko (John Cassavetes), a Mafia hood and the most anti-authoritarian of the bunch, Wladislaw (Charles Bronson), a German speaker who shot a man in his platoon who took off with their medical supplies, an evangelical nut named Maggott (Telly Savalas), a gentle giant with a bad temper (Clint Walker), a dependable soldier (Jim Brown) who killed some racists in self-defense, and a simple minded buffoon (Donald Sutherland).

Reisman forges the men into a fighting machine by pitting them against the MP sergeant (Richard Jaeckel) guarding them. Their next foe is a preening colonel played by Robert Ryan, who takes offense to the slovenly appearance of the Dirty Dozen. After they outmaneuver his fancy brigade in a training exercise, the ragtag unit is ready for the Nazis. They drop into France with Reisman, who all but guarantees that not all of them will make it back.

Directed by Robert Aldrich, from a screenplay Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller adapted from the novel by E.M. Nathanson, The Dirty Dozen was offered to John Wayne early on, but he passed, electing to star in and direct The Green Berets, a pro-war exercise reflecting the patriotic values Wayne hadn’t deviated from much in twenty five years.

Aldrich envisioned an action film that would give the audience the thrills they wanted, while also suggesting that war had become an insane asylum run by the inmates, an attitude more in line with the anti-war sentiment building with the escalation in Vietnam. It became the fifth highest grossing film of 1967, drawing two times the business the flag waving Wayne film would.

At the risk of losing my membership to the He-Man’s Woman Hater’s Club, The Dirty Dozen, for all its popularity with men over the years, isn’t a very good movie. It entertains occasionally, with Cassavetes, Bronson and Brown doing terrific ensemble work, and Lee Marvin playing a cynical SOB to perfection. Nothing else is remotely believable.

The novel was constructed on the fantasy that the army was still hanging GIs (none were during WWII), and that it might also see fit to send a bunch of wacky convicts on a combat operation. If Reisman was supposed to be the soldier or motivator to make this possible, the script never shows it. I never bought that Franko or Maggott wouldn’t have put a bullet in him the first chance they got, while the assault is pure comic book, with a German target showcasing the most lax security in film history.

There’s mindless fun here, sure, with Marvin tweaking his nose at the West Point types, and the Dirty Dozen reciting their assault procedure (“Fifteen: Franko goes in where the others have been!”) but Clint Eastwood would handle this material with much greater finesse in Heartbreak Ridge. Ralph Meeker pops up as an army psychologist, while the camera work and music are all stock when compared to Aldrich’s better work.