History Film / TheDirtyDozen

-->'''Captain Kinder''':...then you don't deny the fact that on the night of April 14-15, a US Military installation was the scene of a ''drunken'' party in which no less than 7 civilian women played an active part!?
-->'''Reisman''': Oh yes sir, they played an active part alright.

* TokenEvilTeammate: Archer Maggott is a bigoted, psychotic, woman-hating, murdering rapist, and Major Reisman knows it. But given that Maggott is also a trained G.I., and the operation needs all the help it can get, Reisman retains his services. Maggott doesn't mind volunteering for the mission once he realizes it could save him from the hangman. [[spoiler: Ultimately he goes completely insane, attempts to kill his teammates, and almost sabotages the entire operation, but for a while at least he was a warm body with a machine gun.]]

* SympatheticMurderer: Wladislaw. He was a soldier on the front lines who shot a superior for cravenly abandoning his post and running away from the battle. Reisman has no objection to Wladislaw's actions, but remarks that he should have done the deed when no one could see him do it.
* TeamTitle: The titular twelve men (that end up going for a long time without getting clean out of rebelling that they have no hot water). [[MarketBasedTitle Some other markets]] also called the film stuff like "Los Doce Del Patibulo" ('The Twelve Men From The Gallows/Death Row', Latin America).

** Although the Dozen manage to gel fairly well while stateside, and perform well in their training exercises, once they get deployed it all quickly goes to Hell. Because they have barely any actual paratrooper experience, one of them botches his landing and dies before the mission even starts; the Psycho Party Member goes rogue, murders a civilian and starts indiscriminately shooting everybody, and has to be killed just to make him stop; his rampage alerts the Germans to their presence and the mission turns into a bloody shooting battle rather than the stealthy commando mission they planned; and, while the mission is ultimately a success, only one of the Dozen manages to escape with his life.

** Wladislaw is the most dependable member of the group, and he’s only been convicted of killing a particularly selfish and cowardly commanding officer.
** Jefferson and Posey are relatively good guys as well. Jefferson's "crime" was most likely self-defense, and he was only sent to death row because of his race - [[DeliberateValuesDissonance This IS the 1940s, after all]].
** The man Posey killed was probably [[AssholeVictim a bully who had it coming]]. If Posey is to be believed, [[AccidentalMurder he didn't even mean to kill the guy]]; he simply [[DoesNotKnowHisOwnStrength didn't know]] that his [[MegatonPunch uppercut would be powerful enough to drive the man's jawbone through his brain]].

* CoolGuns:
** The Dozen use M3 submachine guns. Major Reisman even has his magazines taped together jungle style.
** Major Reisman and Joseph Wladisaw use Walther P38s as their sidearms when they infiltrate the chateau.

* TheImmodestOrgasm: Disturbingly inverted. Maggot is surprised infiltrating the chateau by the lady friend of one of the German officers. She tries to seduce him, but unfortunately for her, Maggot is the resident crazy misogynist of the bunch. She screams, he stabs her slowly, every German soldier in the house hears... but they all assume someone's having fun and laugh about it.

* WarIsHell: Neither the Allies nor the Axis brass come as nice guys by the end, one side being perfectly willing to toss soldiers around as cannon fodder for the sake of seeking glory (and getting giddy about the good results obtained over the corpses of said soldiers), attempting to break ordered operational secrecy out of sheer spite, being brutal racists and full of soldiers halfway to sociopathy (if not already there)... and the other side are the Nazis.

* BlackDudeDiesFirst: [[spoiler:Averted. Jefferson is one of the last members of the Dozen to die. The first one to die is Jiminez]].

** Notably averted in the novel, where instead his counterpart was convicted of tracking down one of the racists who had beaten him within an inch of his life and then murdering him in cold blood.

*** FridgeBrilliance: The Dozen hadn't been training for combat, but to infiltrate a non-military facility far from the front lines. And it was those skills they employed in the wargame.