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15 Q2 2017 / CINEMONTAGE THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY year of release, it was the number one box office hit of 1967. As a reflection on the tides of popular sentiment, it may be no coincidence that this was the first year polls saw a majority of Americans turning against the ongoing Vietnam War. On April 15, 1967, nearly a half million people marched the streets of New York behind Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dr. Benjamin Spock. In Los Angeles, on June 23, over 10,000 protestors greeted President Lyndon Johnson at the Century Plaza Hotel, five days before the movie's opening at Hollywood's Paramount Theatre. Soon after, MGM announced that Dozen had broken all opening-day records for any non-roadshow film in the studio's 43-year history. "Younger people by the bushel thought it was an anti-establishment picture," director Aldrich noted in a 1971 Sight and Sound interview. In The Los Angeles Times in 1981, he said, "When we planned The Dirty Dozen in 1965, do you think we knew that by the time the film came out Americans would be sick of Vietnam so the mood would be just right for our picture? Rubbish!" The movie's anti-authoritarian attitude was not in the original novel, the rights to which Aldrich had tried to buy when the proofs circulated around Hollywood in 1964. MGM outbid him. Author Nathanson got the idea for the story when he was an actor and assistant director on Russ Meyer's The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959). During World War II, the softcore porn moviemaker had been a combat photographer; he told the writer he had shot footage of prisoners in a stockade in England training for a mission in Europe. Meyer's memory may have been hazy, but there was a real-life model for the Dozen. They were not murderers or felons, but brawling US infantrymen who wound up in the stockade regularly for disobeying orders and going AWOL on drunken weekends. Preferring not to bathe, they were dubbed the "Filthy 13," and were parachuted behind enemy lines after midnight on June 6, 1944 to destroy Nazi supply lines and escape routes. In 2012, the unit's 92-year old leader, 101st Airborne Sergeant Jake McNiece, was awarded the French Legion of Honor. Upon buying the rights to Nathanson's novel, MGM gave the project to producer William Perlberg and writer/director George Seaton, who were wrapping the WWII drama, 36 Hours (1964). A year later, the studio re-assigned it to producer Kenneth Hyman, then completing Sidney Lumet's The Hill (1965), with veteran writer Nunnally Johnson to script. When Johnson completed his draft late in 1965, Aldrich was brought in to direct. Working his way up in the industry as an assistant director on films like William Wellman's Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Jean Renoir's The Southerner (1945), Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948) and Charles Chaplin's Limelight (1952), he had directed his first feature, The Big Leaguer, in 1953. After reading Johnson's script, Aldrich said that it "would have made a very acceptable 1945 war picture, but I didn't think a 1945 war picture is necessarily a good 1967 war picture. So I brought in [screenwriter] Lukas Heller. I thought it needed more bite…a more cynical approach to the people in this kind of situation." Having written three of the director's earlier films (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962; Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, 1964; and The Flight of the Phoenix, 1965), Heller worked in the comic sardonic touches underscoring the anti- establishment tone that Aldrich wanted. The director himself contributed the "Last Supper" scene with the outfit reciting a rhyming attack plan that carries over directly into their drop into France. Aldrich offered an apt critique of the finished script: "The first two-thirds were Mr. Heller's contribution toward making it into a 1967 picture, and the last third was a pretty high-class, well-done war picture." The Dirty Dozen. MGM/Photofest