The Dirty Dozen
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
Shortly before the Normandy landings, the U.S. Army sought to destabilize the Nazi regime. In exchange for a hypothetical amnesty, twelve death-row inmates were offered a suicide mission: to attack a castle in France, a vacation spot for Nazi officers. A landmark of American war cinema, made while the Vietnam War was raging. Robert Aldrich’s filmmaking is at its best here: tense style, disillusioned cynicism, raw and sadistic violence, fierce anti-militarism, and flamboyant cast of actors, who shine with their over-the-top performances and sharp dialogue.
Robert Aldrich
Robert Aldrich was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. An iconoclastic and maverick auteur working in many genres during the Golden Age of Hollywood, he directed mainly films noir, war movies, westerns and dark melodramas with Gothic overtones. His most notable credits include Vera Cruz (1954), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Big Knife (1955), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Longest Yard (1974). Containing a "macho mise-en-scène and resonant reworkings of classic action genres," Aldrich's films were known for pushing the boundaries of violence in mainstream cinema, as well as for their psychologically complex interpretations of genre film tropes.
_1962_-_Production_photo._Robert_Aldrich,_Bette_Davis.jpg){kind=link}