DIRTY YET CLEAN

Recently I had the opportunity to re-watch, for the first time in over 20 years, Robert Aldrich's DIRTY DOZEN (1967), in part because a friend wanted to compare it to recent derivative INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (2009).

Given that DOZEN came out the same year as Arthur Penn's BONNIE AND CLYDE, I expected that DOZEN would fall into my "dirty and spectacular" category of violence, as defined here. But whether in comparison with the Penn flick or with Aldrich's own 1955 KISS ME DEADLY, DOZEN was unexpectedly "clean," in the sense that in DOZEN a lot of people got shot or blown up but there were very few signs of bleeding or mangled bodies.

In addition, I was surprised as to how much of the film is devoted to (a) putting forth the preposterous initiating premise re: using convicted soldiers to wipe out a nest of Nazi officers, and (b) jumping through a variety of hoops to make the execution of the premise seem as probable as Aldrich and his scripters can humanly manage. In other words, there is no attempt, as in Tarantino's IB, to simply "go with the flow" of the wild concept: Aldrich and his collaborators must have thought they had to make the premise seem as logical as possible in order for the audience to invest themselves in the film.

In addition, all the violence that transpires in DOZEN is there for strictly functional reasons. There are several set-pieces, both during the training of the antiheroic soldiers and during their climactic battle with German forces. But at no time does Aldrich make the violence look deliberately staged or even ritualistic. In DOZEN the traditionally "dirty" job of killing the enemy is simply necessary, and Aldrich's treatment of the violence is similarly functional, lacking any of the stylistic flourishes seen in films of spectacular violence-- though he did explore such tendencies in later works like 1973's EMPEROR OF THE NORTH POLE and 1974's THE LONGEST YARD.

So DIRTY DOZEN is a film I classify as "clean and functional," as against INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, which is "dirty and spectacular." IB may not be as spectacular in its treatment of violence as other Tarantino works have been, but blood flows and bones conspicuously break, thus making IB closer in its approach to Penn's BONNIE even though plotwise IB recycles the basic motifs of Aldrich's DOZEN.