By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: 1985’s The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, a belated follow-up to the classic 1967 war movie starring Lee Marvin.
The humble telemovie is renowned for travelling a number of oft-trod narrative paths: the largely (unfairly) maligned “disease of the week” movie; the low-key biopic; the historical drama; social issue stories; classic TV series reunions; cheaper knock-offs of big screen trends; remakes of previous films; literary adaptations; and even detours into genre and exploitation territory. Another regular play of the telemovie was the barely canonical small screen sequel to a popular feature film.
Over the years, this has taken many and varied forms, with just a few examples highlighting how peculiar (and how quickly forgotten) these telemovie sequels could often be: witness 1976’s Look What’s Happened To Rosemary’s Baby (which follows Mia Farrow’s demon-child from the 1968 horror classic Rosemary’s Baby into adulthood), 1979’s Christmas Lillies Of The Field (a festive follow up to 1963’s Lillies Of The Field, with Billy Dee Williams subbing for Sidney Poitier), 1983’s Trackdown: Finding The Goodbar Killer (George Segal’s cop investigates the murder of Diane Keaton’s character from the 1977 classic Looking For Mr. Goodbar), 1994’s The Birds II: Land’s End (featuring Tippi Hedren, but not as the character she played in Alfred Hitchcock’s exalted original!), and 1996’s To Sir, With Love II (Sidney Poitier returns, this time teaching in Chicago instead of England), to name just a few.
One of the most iconic feature films to receive the telemovie follow-up treatment was Unsung Auteur Robert Aldrich’s big, bad, brawling, hard-as-nails 1967 war movie The Dirty Dozen. Famed for its bleak, brutal cynicism and decidedly hip late-1960s take on WW2, this box office smash starred the late, great Lee Marvin as the taciturn Major John Reisman, a military hard-head charged with training and corralling an unlikely crew of crooks, misfits and borderline lunatics (played by the too-cool likes of John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, Clint Walker, Jim Brown and Donald Sutherland) to carry out a suicide mission behind enemy lines. Packed with gallows humour, rich characters, hard-edged action and imaginative set-pieces, The Dirty Dozen ingeniously walked a tonal tightrope, and was unquestionably one of the best war movies of its era.
Nearly twenty years after it dominated at the box office, The Dirty Dozen finally got a sequel in the ropey but undeniably entertaining telemovie The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, which came with a pedigree befitting the high-tower status of the original. Rather than the usual TV vet, the man behind the camera for this sequel was Hollywood mainstay Andrew V. McLaglen, who had previously helmed terrific “old school” action, war and western flicks like McLintock (1963), The Devil’s Brigade (1968), Cahill US Marshall (1973), The Last Hard Men (1976), The Wild Geese (1978), North Sea Hijack (1980), The Sea Wolves (1980) and many, many more. The writer, meanwhile, was Michael Kane, who had penned a fistful of very interesting films in The Legend Of The Lone Ranger (1982), Southern Comfort (1981), All The Right Moves (1983) and The Bear (1984).
Undeniably, however, the biggest asset in the arsenal of The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission is returning star Lee Marvin, who once again brings all of his biting, keenly intelligent, sarcastic brilliance to the indelible character of Major John Reisman. The film’s aforementioned ropiness, however, also begins with the return of Lee Marvin. While the actor has obviously aged considerably in the eighteen years between the two films, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission is still set in WW2, effectively taking place only a few years after the events of the first film. A wiser move to explain Marvin’s obviously aged appearance would have been to set this adventure in, say, the decades-later Korean War, or even the early days of the conflict in Vietnam…but doing things wisely is not really the forte of The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission.
Following hot on the heels of the curiously unexplained ageing of Major John Reisman (sure, war is hell, but come on) comes the mission itself. US Army General Worden (a very jovial Ernest Borgnine, also returning from the original film…and also eighteen years older) and his stereotypically pompous British allies have discovered a plot by German military officers to assassinate Adolph Hitler…and they need it stopped! Huh? According to their logic, Hitler is botching the Nazi war effort, and the allies need the madman to keep doing it so they can completely obliterate Germany and wipe it off the map. So yes, the mission is to save Adolph Hitler! General Worden (who is shown cheating at golf, not unlike another American leader) knows that there is only one man for this behind-enemy-lines suicide mission, and a reluctant Major John Reisman is drafted in and promptly assigned a crew of military prisoners as his team of commandos.
In the film’s highlight sequence, MP Sgt. Clyde Bowren (the great character actor Richard Jaeckel, also returning from the original film) introduces Reisman to his motley crew of behind-bars bad boys, which includes a whoppin’ and hollerin’ good ol’ boy (CHiPS star Larry Wilcox), a stoney-faced Native-American (future Predator player Sonny Landham), an African-American sniper and ex-cop (Ricco Ross), a racist jazz drummer (a pre-Wiseguy Ken Wahl), and other miscreants, most of whom reveal largely altruistic reasons for their imprisonment and military blackballing.
There’s a great training sequence where the characters of the team are slowly drawn out, but this also raises a few questions in the scripting department. Why make the film’s resident racist a drummer who dreams of opening a jazz club (“Only for whites,” he sneers), a music form that would presumably bring with it a little more forward thinking? And why give that role to Ken Wahl, the film’s most obviously “heroic”-type cast member? Sure, you could argue that it’s an interesting effort to go against type, but it just plays out as a little strange. Some of the other character moves are equally perplexing, and give the film a very curious tone.
Obviously blessed with a bigger budget than most telemovies, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission is jammed with tightly directed action sequences, and comes spiced with odd, occasionally jarring moments of humour, some of which work and some of which don’t. While the often-offbeat Robert Aldrich worked this mix of dark humour and action beautifully in the cynical 1967 original, the considerably hoarier Andrew V. McLaglen has trouble hitting the right notes of arch absurdity every time. At just 95 minutes, however, this rollicking, enjoyably old-fashioned war movie is quickly paced and energetic, while the climax effectively takes the inherent goofiness of the original mission right through to its bizarre end-point. A fun if slightly wobbly throwback to a masterful original, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission is a perfect example of what a mixed bag the telemovie sequel to a big screen feature could often be.
A small screen ratings winner, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission itself prompted the production of two more telemovie sequels. Lee Marvin passed away in 1987, which saw the commanding officer reins passed to the unlikely figure of Telly Savalas (confusingly playing a different character to the nasty one he essayed in the original, who of course got killed in that one) for 1987’s low-rent The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission and 1988’s The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission. Ernest Borgnine was also on board for these lesser efforts, which starred lukewarm talents like Erik Estrada, Vincent Van Patten, and The Fall Guy’s Heather Thomas, who gamely played the first female member of The Dirty Dozen.
Availability: The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission is included as a special feature (!) on the Blu-ray release for The Dirty Dozen, while the two follow-up sequels The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission (1987) and The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission (1987) are easily available on various streaming services.
If you enjoyed this review, check out our other vintage telemovies A Very Brady Christmas, The Gladiator, Elvis, The Rat Pack, Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story, Terror Among Us, The Hanged Man, Hardcase, Charlie’s Angels: Angels In Vegas, Vanishing Point, To Heal A Nation, Fugitive Among Us, To Kill A Cop, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Police Story: A Chance To Live, Murder On Flight 502, Moon Of The Wolf, The Secret Night Caller, Cotton Candy, And The Band Played On, Gargoyles, Death Car On The Freeway, Short Walk To Daylight, Trapped, Hotline, Killdozer, The Jericho Mile, Mongo’s Back In Town, and Tribes.
