Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/832212
16 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2017 THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY As pre-production started up early in 1966, Aldrich wrote to producer Hyman about the movie's central character, Major Reisman, the maverick Army officer pressured into training the criminal squad. He wanted him to be the "most cynical, suspicious, sophisticated, anti-authoritarian, anti- establishment, mean, miserable son of a bitch that anybody has ever seen in a movie." MGM had offered the part to John Wayne; he turned it down because he thought the script was "unpatriotic," and supported the Vietnam War by making The Green Berets (1968). Aldrich recruited Lee Marvin, fresh from winning an Oscar for his dual role as gunslinger adversaries in the Western comedy Cat Ballou (1965). A supporting actor in the director's WWII movie Attack (1956), Marvin had played a manipulative colonel with an eye for a future in politics. Several of Dozen's supporting actors worked with Aldrich before — Ernest Borgnine, Ralph Meeker, George Kennedy, Richard Jaeckel and Robert Ryan — but, of the 12 title characters, Charles Bronson alone had been in earlier Aldrich films. The director asked Jack Palance, his star in Attack and The Big Knife (1955), to play the Bible- thumping racist, murderer and rapist Maggott, but the actor refused. Aldrich told an American Film Institute seminar in 1971 that Palance, an active supporter of the Civil Rights movement, felt it was not a serious depiction of bigotry. Telly Savalas took the role instead. A weightier perspective on racism came through in the character of Robert Jefferson, a black man condemned to death for killing white soldiers trying to castrate him. For Cleveland Browns fullback Jim Brown, one of the all-time great football players, this was his second movie and a further step into an acting career to follow his planned retirement from sports at the end of the next season. After two weeks of intensive rehearsals, production began in England on April 25, 1966, lensed by veteran British cinematographer Edward Scaife (Outcast of the Islands, 1951; Khartoum, 1966). It was shot on location around Buckinghamshire, about 20 miles north of London, and on the backlot of MGM's Borehamwood Studios. The scheduled four-month shoot began to stretch into six months when weather turned wet after the first month. Aldrich also admitted falling "a little behind schedule because we kept changing the script every day." One such change led to a starring career for one of the Dozen actors. A scene written for the huge, muscular Samson Posey (played by 1950s TV Western star Clint Walker) called for him to pose as an incognito general and inspect an airfield's troops when the Dozen report for parachute training. As the shoot began, Walker told Aldrich that Posey's character would not be able to pull such a prank off. The director turned to Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, portraying the lean, goofy Vernon Pinkley, and said, "You with the big ears, you do it." The scene in the finished film led producer Ingo Preminger (brother of director Otto) to send Sutherland the script for Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970). Meanwhile, the delays kept Brown from reporting to summer training. In July, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell said he would fine his player $1,500 for every week of training he missed. Taking umbrage at the threat, the fullback announced his immediate retirement from football. Construction of the Nazis' chateau and its grounds for the climactic third act of the movie caused yet another delay. It took the art department under art director Bill Hutchinson (Lord Jim and Dr. Zhivago, both 1965) four months to build the 240-foot-long, 50-foot-high building with bomb shelter, tunnels, boathouse and landscaping with gardens and a river. As the set neared completion, the special effects crew told Hyman and Aldrich that it would take an enormously expensive 70 tons of explosives to The Dirty Dozen. MGM/Photofest