Program Alert- "The Dirty Dozen "on TCM, Sunday at Noon

As we have previously professed on our blogs, we are huge admirers of the late character actor Lee Marvin, who won a Best Actor Oscar for "Cat Ballou" in 1965. He is one of many great novelty screen legends in the epic action film "The Dirty Dozen" (1967. d-Robert Aldrich). Some of the other actors in the flick are Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Telly Savalas, John Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland, Jim Brown and George Kennedy. Of those actors, Borgnine (well at last report), Kennedy, Brown and Sutherland were still alive. We weren't sure about Kennedy until I saw on the IMDB that he is alive at age 85 though he has not supposedly made a film in a long time. Alas, the others are not.

I recently saw Marvin and Cassavetes in the second version of "The Killers" (1964, d-Don Siegel) which is best known as Ronald Reagan's last film role (he played a mob boss who slaps Angie Dickinson across the face.) Marvin also co-starred with Bronson in several films, including the early eighties novelty film "Death Hunt," which is still not available on Netflix!

"The Dirty Dozen" airs Sunday at noon on TCM, and it is one of several war films that the network is showing for Memorial Day weekend.

According to the IMDB, John Wayne was originally offered Marvin's role (Maj. John Reisman), but he turned it down to star and direct in his pro-Vietnam War film "The Green Berets."

Marvin himself liked "The Big Red One" (1980) which was directed by his good friend Sam Fuller as he said it better reflected his own war experiences, which he saw as both difficult and disturbing. Marvin, who was (perhaps surprisingly given his tough guy image) a political liberal, also publicly expressed reservations about how "The Dirty Dozen" glorified war.

Like Marvin, Savalas, Bronson and Borgnine all served in World War II.

Jack Palance actually turned down the Savalas role because of all the violence in "The Dirty Dozen."

Sutherland was a late addition to the cast, and his role in the film lead to him being cast in Robert Altman's vintage film "MASH" (1970) which was certainly not a pro-war film!