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18 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2017 THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY destroy the chateau as scripted. Hutchinson tore down and rebuilt the entire middle section of the chateau with foamed plastic and cork so it could be blown up with just one ton of explosives. This delay prompted singer Trini López's lawyer to demand more money for his client, or he would pull him out of his first movie role to play his contracted performance dates. Aldrich chose to write López out of the movie's ending by breaking his character's neck parachuting into France and giving his scripted heroic death scene to another one of the Dozen. Shooting finally wrapped October 13 and Aldrich was back in Hollywood October 20 to start six months of editing with Michael Luciano, ACE. This was Luciano's 11th film with Aldrich since editing the director's second feature, World for Ransom, in 1954. He would go on to cut nine more of Aldrich's movies after Dozen. Setting the tone with the opening scene of Reisman watching a military hanging, the editing sustains its involving pace as he refashions a volatile rabble of misfits into an effective working unit, despite their hopeless situation. Luciano won an ACE Eddie Award and an Oscar nomination for his cutting (all four of his Oscar nods were for his work on Aldrich movies). After a well-received screening of the director's cut for exhibitors in April 1967 MGM re-processed the movie, adding six-track stereophonic sound and making it the first motion picture ever shot in 35mm to have 70mm release prints. As a result, Dozen lost the tops and bottoms of the 35mm framing to achieve its widescreen format. As a sign of the changing standards of the Production Code, despite concerns over violence and profanity, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) gave the film its approval. The MPAA stipulated, however, that credits and advertising must carry the warning, "Suggested for Mature Audiences." With the movie's overwhelming box office success, Aldrich was named Director of the Year by the National Association of Theatre Owners. His share of the profits from his most commercially successful film also enabled him to purchase his own studio. Five years later, after four box office failures, he was forced to sell it. Aldrich did not get an Oscar nomination for his direction, but the picture garnered three more nominations in addition to Best Editing. Nominated for Best Supporting Actor, John Cassavetes lost to fellow Dozen performer Kennedy for his role in Cool Hand Luke (1967). The MGM Studio Sound Department was nominated for Best Sound for the work of sound recordists Claude Hitchcock and Franklin Milton, sound editor John Poyner and, uncredited, sound editor Van Allen James and re-recording mixer Aaron Rochin, CAS. Poyner, however, on his own, won the Oscar for Best Sound Effects. Breathing new life into the war movie, The Dirty Dozen reinvented the model for military mission films, from The Devil's Brigade (1968) to Inglourious Basterds (2009), and cracked open the door for bloodier violence on screen — soon thrown wide open by Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969). In the late 1980s, it also generated three TV movie sequels and a short-lived television series. More significantly, the Dozen's extermination of Nazi generals by gasoline and grenade was widely seen as a comment on the criminal complicity of all participants in war, no matter on which side they fought. As Aldrich noted, "The whole nature of war is dehumanizing... European critics all picked up on the parallel between burning people alive and the use of napalm, whether they liked the picture or not." f The Dirty Dozen. MGM/Photofest