Forlorn Hope

Part I: From "Desperate Journey" to "The Dirty Dozen"

We came across an interesting phrase the other day we’d never heard of before. "Forlorn hope" describes a group of soldiers who volunteer for, or are chosen for, the lead role in a military assault on a heavily defended site, where the odds for heavy casualties are high. The term derives from the Dutch "verloen hoop," or "lost heap." The Dutch word "hoop" was erroneously translated into English as "hope."

When soldiers were armed with muzzle-loading muskets, the forlorn hope was the first wave of troops who attacked a breach in the enemy’s defenses during a siege. However many would be killed or wounded as cannon fodder, the objective was that enough of the number would hopefully survive to maintain a foothold that could be reinforced while the defenders were occupied with reloading and recovering their fallen.

The term eventually applied to any military band put in harm’s way. The forlorn hope was typically led by a foolhardy junior officer aspiring for personal advancement. The French version of the forlorn hope, "Les Enfants Perdus" ("The Lost Children"), were all promised promotions if they were courageous enough to survive. Despite the deadly risks, soldiers would compete for the opportunity to head such suicide missions.


(Pictured below: "The Forlorn Hope" by Civil War artist Don Troiani)

The histories of all wars, like the best stories in war movies, are rife with accounts of desperate missions, successful or suicidal, that unfold behind enemy lines. Not surprisingly, such films cranked out by Hollywood during World War II were blatant propaganda for the Allied effort.

"Desperate Journey" (1942) starred swashbuckling screen idol Errol Flynn in a boyish adventure yarn about a Royal Air Force bomber forced down in Germany and the surviving crew’s cliff-hanging exploits to escape enemy territory, including reckless car chases and last-second getaways, pausing only briefly to blow up a Nazi chemical plant.


Among Flynn’s gung-ho comrades are Ronald Reagan and Alan Hale (above). In their rare screen pairings, which also included "Santa Fe Trail," Flynn and Reagan epitomized the wisecracking cuteness and impudent bravado often associated with Flynn’s devil-may-care career. Hale was a stalwart sidekick for Flynn in a dozen films, most notably as an imposing Little John in "The Adventures of Robin Hood." (Hale’s lookalike son, Alan Hale Jr., became famous in his own right as the Skipper in the TV series "Gilligan’s Island.")


Our dauntless heroes are relentlessly pursued by a Nazi colonel (played by the multifaceted actor Raymond Massey, above) and his command of laughably inept troops. "The Nazis," according to the writers of The Films of Errol Flynn, "seemed to be composed of the blind and the mentally deficient." In a script not to be taken at all seriously, the boys commandeer a German bomber for a flight back to England, and Flynn triumphantly declares, "Now for Australia and a crack at the Japs!"


Three years later, Flynn delivered an altogether different performance, remarkable for its straightforward humanness and professionalism, in "Objective, Burma!" Produced in a semi-documentary manner, the grim plot depicted a fictional mission by Flynn and American paratroopers to destroy a Japanese radio installation. When the plan to safely extricate the soldiers fails, they are forced to make their way through 150 miles of enemy territory. The hostile Burmese jungle was satisfactorily represented by the Lucky Baldwin Santa Anita ranch near Pasadena, California.



After the United States entered World War II in 1941, Errol Flynn frequently came under fire for his apparent failure to enlist while continuing to portray war heroes on the screen, which also included roles in "Dive Bomber" and "Edge of Darkness." Flynn, in fact, had tried to join branches of the armed forces but was rejected for health reasons, and the studios’ reluctance to outright defend their popular star stemmed from the desire to hide the true state of his well-being. Flynn had an enlarged heart and had already endured one cardiac arrest. He suffered from tuberculosis, as well as a painful back - which he self-medicated with morphine and later heroin - and occasional bouts of malaria.





(Flynn’s "Desperate Journey" costar, Ronald Reagan, was classified for limited service due to his near-sightedness and was excluded from duty overseas. As a result, he participated in the production of numerous training films for the Army Air Corps motion picture unit.)


When Americans ultimately answered the call to war, support flooded in from every corner of society, none less enthusiastic than the show business community. James Stewart was among the first major movie stars to wear a military uniform in World War II, enlisting as a private in the Army Air Corps (the forerunner of the Army Air Force), rising to colonel in four years. As a major, he had commanded several bombing missions over Germany. Clark Gable, dubbed the King of Hollywood, enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942 and within two years was promoted to major.



As the lion’s share of Hollywood’s male stars signed up to serve, John Wayne, whose career was just starting to roll, dragged his heels. He was exempted from service because of his age (he was 34 at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) and family status, and the studio head of Republic Pictures threatened to sue Wayne if he breached his contract. Although he never illegally avoided the draft, the celluloid hero of "The Fighting Seabees," "They Were Expendable," "Back to Bataan," "Sands of Iwo Jima" and "Flying Leathernecks" did avoid actively pursuing enlistment. But all this is a story for another time.



Not much more than two decades after the Allied victories in Europe and Japan, "The Dirty Dozen" (1967), produced and directed by Robert Aldrich during America’s tumultuous conflict in Vietnam, introduced a theretofore unseen cynicism in depictions of World War II. Lee Marvin starred as Major Reisman, a reputable nonconformist saddled with the unsavory task of putting together a squad of convicted military felons for a mission to infiltrate German-occupied France on the eve of D-Day and the Allied invasion of Normandy and destroy a chateau housing a convocation of top Nazi officers and their wives. (In the prologue to the 1965 novel, author E.M. Nathanson noted that although he had heard tales of the possible existence of such a unit, he could not find proof in the archives of the U.S. Army.)



Robert Aldrich (above), a director who often produced many of his films, is best remembered for action movies that emphasized strong, often unpopular political perspectives, more often than not reflecting his personal rebellion against authority. "I look for characters who feel strongly enough about something not to be concerned with the prevailing odds, but to struggle against those odds," he once said. "The struggle for self-determination, the struggle for what a character wants his life to be."

The cynicism inherent in an individual’s survival was a recurring characteristic among Aldrich’s idealistic outsiders, from James Stewart in "The Flight of the Phoenix" to Burt Lancaster in "Ulzana’s Raid" and "Twilight’s Last Gleaming" to Burt Reynolds in "The Longest Yard." Aldrich and frequent writing collaborator Lukas Heller reworked the original script (by Nunnally Johnson, whose screenplay for "The Grapes of Wrath" garnered an Academy Award nomination) to not only reflect the director’s sensibilities but to fit, as well, Lee Marvin’s no-nonsense screen presence.


MGM, the film’s distributor, initially backed John Wayne as the star, but Aldrich typically wanted a less idealized hero. As a Marine sergeant in World War II, Marvin was wounded in the Battle of Saipan in the Pacific. Most of his platoon were killed. Marvin’s wound in the buttocks, from machine gun fire, severed his sciatic nerve, and he was awarded the Purple Heart. In Aldrich’s 1956 combat film "Attack!" Marvin (above) had portrayed an opportunistic and undisciplined lieutenant colonel. When the actor’s name suddenly gained box-office value with his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in "Cat Ballou," MGM relented to Aldrich’s wish.

"Aldrich was a master at presenting his distinctly cynical outlook in the context of crowd-pleasing entertainment," according to the editors of The Movie Guide, "and ‘The Dirty Dozen’ is one of his most effective and lasting efforts." As an archetype of the director’s outsiders, Marvin’s Major Reisman, described onscreen as "very short on discipline," freely states his dislike for the system he serves, openly criticizing the military brass and his assigned mission. He may not obey orders, but he will do whatever it takes to accomplish his goal.

Early in the training of Reisman’s suicide squad (portrayed by, among others, John Cassavetes, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland and Clint Walker), an Army psychiatrist assesses them as "the most twisted, antisocial bunch of psychopathic deformities I have ever run into." The deadpan major replies, "Who better to fight and win a war?"

One of the all-time most popular movies about World War II (it was the 15th highest grossing film of 1967, allowing Aldrich to buy his own studio, and John Cassavetes (below) earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his hot-wired portrayal of gangster-wannabe Victor Franko) "The Dirty Dozen" is also singularly the most unusual in its presentation of remarkably unpleasant individuals on an undeniably barbaric mission. The Movie Guide dubbed it "the ultimate macho action movie. Yet it calls into question the morals of the Americans, not the Germans." As much as Reisman’s charges are social castoffs, his commanding officers (especially the general played by Robert Ryan) come across as amoral misfits themselves, manipulating soldiers as mere pawns in their war game.

In the book 101 War Movies You Must See Before You Die, editor Steven Jay Schneider noted that the film "reflects the increasing willingness to question established social authority that was evident in the late 1960s culture, and the misfit characteristics of the Dozen align them with a generation that was about to start dropping out of the mainstream lifestyle and questioning conventional social values."

Interestingly, "The Dirty Dozen" was beat to the punch by four years in its depiction of convict GIs on a desperate mission behind enemy lines in World War II by B-movie producer-director Roger Corman’s "The Secret Invasion" (1963). In his 1990 memoir How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Corman, who is best known for his series of drive-in thrillers based on tales by Edgar Allan Poe, starring Vincent Price, recalled having a script titled "The Dubious Patriots," in which "British intelligence frees five convicts whose mission is to spring a top-ranking Italian general from a Dubrovnik prison in order for him to turn his own men against Nazi allies."

Corman was attracted to the theme of "bad men sent to do good as a way to redeem themselves and win their freedom." The title was changed to "The Secret Invasion," which, according to Corman, "was believed to be more commercial." Led by veteran Hollywood star Stewart Granger as a guilt-ridden major, the squad included explosives expert and Irish Republican Army member Mickey Rooney, criminal mastermind Raf Vallone (Cardinal Lamberto in "The Godfather Part III"), forger Edd Byrnes (star of TV’s "77 Sunset Strip") and cold-blooded killer Henry Silva (recognizable from his several screen appearances with Frank Sinatra, among them "Ocean’s Eleven," "Sergeants Three" and "The Manchurian Candidate").

"It was the story of a select group of criminals used in war," Corman noted, "based on the premise that war is itself a criminal activity and criminals are therefore its most effective practitioners. It was simply a matter of fitting the outlaw, criminal mentality to the motivations of war." This was Corman’s first film for a major studio (United Artists) and at $600,000 "the biggest budget I’d ever had up to that point…double my bigger Poe pictures…It grossed somewhere around $3 million."

Nearly two decades after "The Dirty Dozen," a visibly aged Lee Marvin starred in the 1985 made-for-television movie "The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission." Preposterously taking place a mere six months after the original mission (with Ernest Borgnine and Richard Jaeckel reprising their original roles as well), the absurd plot finds a new collection of reprobates whose ironic task is to prevent a rogue Nazi general from assassinating Hitler. Marvin lived long enough to make one more film, coincidentally another guys-on-a-mission story, "The Delta Force," with Chuck Norris. Marvin died of a heart attack in 1987, age 67, and was interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

Telly Savalas, whose aptly named character Maggott (above) was killed off in "The Dirty Dozen," replaced Marvin as the squad leader in the TV movies "The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission" (1987) and "The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission" (1988). A 1988 TV series, without Savalas, lasted six episodes.

Talk of a big-screen remake of "The Dirty Dozen," at one time, had director Guy Ritchie ("Sherlock Holmes") attached to a script by Zak Penn ("X2: X-Men United," "X-Men: The Last Stand"). Donald Sutherland (below), who credited "The Dirty Dozen" with launching his career, voiced his fear that a remake would undermine the anti-war intent of the original. He told MTV, "It’s silly…Forget it." According to him, Robert Aldrich "was making a film against war…he was showing how brutal and vulgar and awful it was. It’s not an adventure story."

Part II: Macaroni Combat and "Inglourious Basterds"

The word last time around was "forlorn hope." Today’s phrase is "Euro War," used for a loose genre of war movies produced overseas that became popular in the 1960s. The genre was also known as "Macaroni Combat" since most of the films were produced and directed by Italians. Typically shot in Europe with an international crew and cast, including at least one fading Hollywood star, such productions, like their counterparts, Spaghetti Westerns, were characterized by low budgets, gimmicky camerawork and excessive violence.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, most Macaroni Combat pictures were set during World War II in hopes of duplicating the success of such American films as "The Guns of Navarone," "Where Eagles Dare" and especially "The Dirty Dozen." The Italians’ fascination with the entertainment value of the subject matter is intriguing, considering their own remarkably unremarkable role in World War II.

During the First World War, Italy fought against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Under the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini (above, with Adolf Hitler), Italy formed a pact with Nazi Germany in 1936 and entered World War II in 1940. Inspired by Hitler’s victorious blitzkriegs in Poland and France, Mussolini invaded Greece in October of 1940, only to suffer humiliating defeat within a few months. Italian forces were also defeated by the British in North Africa, and Italy itself was invaded by the Allies in June 1943. Three months later, Italy surrendered.

Nazi forces abandoned the country in April 1945, three days before Mussolini was summarily executed by Communist partisans. The violated corpses of Mussolini, his mistress, and other executed Fascists were hung by their feet from meat hooks from the roof of a gas station for public viewing.

By the 1980s Euro War cinema included soldiers in the Vietnam War, as well as mercenaries in Africa, but no matter the history or geography, the titles proclaimed in-your-face machismo - "Dirty Heroes," "Five for Hell," "Eagles Over London," "Hell’s Heroes," "Churchill’s Leopards," "From Hell to Victory" - and every one seemed to have the tireless German character actor Klaus Kinski in the cast.

The quintessential Macaroni Combat picture, unmistakably inspired by "The Dirty Dozen," has to be 1978’s "The Inglorious Bastards."

In France, a convoy of American soldiers destined for military prison for crimes ranging from desertion to murder is attacked by German aircraft. The surviving convicts opt for legging it to neutral Switzerland but end up sidetracked as reluctant volunteers for a dangerous commando mission behind enemy lines to steal high-tech V2 rocket hardware from a heavily guarded Nazi train.

The first crack at making the movie took place stateside in 1976 when director Ted V. Mikels was approached. Mikels (above), an independent filmmaker known for such cult favorites as "The Astro Zombies," "Blood Orgy of the She Devils," "The Corpse Grinders" and "The Doll Squad," turned the offer down on the basis that any movie posing as a "Dirty Dozen" rip-off was a decade too late, and he believed the word "bastard" itself equated box-office disaster in the 1970s.

The directing reins eventually ended up in the hands of Enzo G. Castellari, who had made a name for himself in the 1960s with several Spaghetti Westerns, including "Go Kill and Come Back," "Seven Winchesters for a Massacre" (above) and "Kill Them All and Come Back Alive." Dubbed the "European Sam Peckinpah," he frequently used slow-motion cross-cutting in action sequences, obviously influenced by Peckinpah’s "The Wild Bunch." (Castellari’s 1981 production "Great White," starring James Franciscus and Vic Morrow, was yanked from theater screens after a successful lawsuit by Universal Pictures, who accused the Italian of plagiarizing "Jaws.")

During production, the film’s working title was "Bastards Without Glory." Its uninspired Italian title, "Quel maledetto treno blindato," translates as "That Damned Armored Train." As for the stars, Bo Svenson, following an impressive early screen role as Robert Redford’s rival barnstorming aviator in 1975’s "The Great Waldo Pepper," took over the role of real-life Tennessee lawman Buford Pusser in two sequels to the hit 1973 film "Walking Tall," and Fred Williamson was an established star of several blaxploitation pictures, among them "Hammer," "Black Caesar" and "Hell Up in Harlem," to name but a handful.

"The Inglorious Bastards" was released on videocassette under the titles "Counterfeit Commandos" and "Desperate Mission." Re-edited to make Williamson the center of attention over Svenson, the film was marketed as "G.I. Bro," with the catch phrase "If you’re a kraut, he’ll take you out!"

Williamson, who performed his own impressive stunts in "The Inglorious Bastards," worked with director Castellari again in the futuristic sci-fi thrillers "1990: Bronx Warriors" and "Warriors of the Wasteland." In 1987, Williamson starred in the Macaroni Combat "Hell’s Heroes," which, despite its Vietnam setting, was retitled "Inglorious Bastards 2" for DVD release.

Quentin Tarantino, an unabashed fan of what he acknowledges as the "Macaroni Combat genre of a bunch of guys on a mission," once claimed he adopted "The Inglorious Bastards" as his own "personal movie," a "private little movie that only I knew about." Tarantino allegedly toiled for more than a decade on his script for what would become "Inglourious Basterds." (Asked about the misspelling of the title, the filmmaker pompously declared, "I’m never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to explain it would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place.")

Tarantino’s initial premise of a western evolved into a wartime version of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," set in France. As a nod to Sergio Leone, he considered subtitling the film "Once Upon a Time…in Nazi-Occupied France." In 2001, he proclaimed it to be his "bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission film…my ‘Dirty Dozen’ or ‘Where Eagles Dare’ or ‘Guns of Navarone’ kind of thing." By 2002, he had churned out three nearly finished scripts, deeming them "some of the best writing I’ve ever done."

After making the two "Kill Bill" pictures, Tarantino trimmed the lengthy script and planned to start filming in 2005, continuing to describe it as a spaghetti western set in France around the time of D-Day. He told the Hollywood Reporter, "I’m going to find a place that actually resembles…the Spanish locales they had in spaghetti westerns - a no man’s land. With U.S. soldiers, and French peasants and the French resistance and German occupation troops, it was kind of a no man’s land. That will really be my spaghetti western but with World War II iconography."

He said, "It’ll be epic and have my take of the sociological battlefield at the time with the racism and barbarism on all sides…" In 2004, however, Tarantino was sidetracked again by an unrealized kung fu movie and then by his contribution to "Grindhouse" in 2007.

By the time "Inglourious Basterds" reached the screen, any pretense Tarantino (above) had about spaghetti westerns had vanished. His deliriously twisted revisionist history meticulously interweaves two simultaneous plots to assassinate Germany’s top Nazis, including Hitler himself, one devised by a young Jewish woman who runs a small movie theater, the other involving a rogue team of Jewish Allied soldiers (led by Brad Pitt in a bravura performance) with a habit of scalping Nazis.

Standout amongst the Nazis is Austrian-born actor Christoph Waltz's breathtakingly florid characterization of "Jew Hunter" Colonel Hans Landa (below).

"I start off with a certain genre," Tarantino told one interviewer, "that’s the jumping off point. I intend to expand the genre, blow the doors off of it." He also stated "the movie’s closer to something like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, with a community of characters, an overall ‘big story’ that leads somewhere, and a mix of invented characters and historical characters."

Firmly established in the year’s Top 10 lists by most critics, the movie was hailed by People magazine (which called it "a revenge fantasy version of the war") as Tarantino’s "most accomplished film since 1994’s ‘Pulp Fiction.’" "Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds,’" critic Roger Ebert noted, "is a big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he’s the real thing, a director of quixotic delights."

The first New York screening of "Inglourious Basterds" was at the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. "World War II is one of the most interesting and fascinating story subjects of the 20th century," Tarantino remarked. "We - humanity - stopped the return of the Dark Ages, which could have very well happened if the Nazis had been successful."

Enzo G. Castellari, who appeared as a Nazi general in his "The Inglorious Bastards," has a cameo in Tarantino’s film, again as a Nazi general (above), prominently visible in the background while Pitt awkwardly impersonates an Italian at the premiere of the film-within-the-film, "Nation’s Pride." Castellari’s "Inglorious Bastards" star Bo Svenson, who had a cameo in Tarantino’s "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" as Reverend Harmony, pops up in "Inglourious Basterds" as the American colonel (below) in a scene from the aforementioned "Nation’s Pride."

Postscript: 71-year-old Enzo G. Castellari recently wrapped production on his first feature in 15 years, a low-budget action flick that was filmed as "Bloody Waters," only to be curiously retitled "Caribbean Basterds." Variety, the entertainment trade newspaper, quoted Castellari as stating, "Quentin’s going to be surprised when he sees the title, and I’m going to say, ‘You were inspired by my movie, but I just copied yours with no shame.’" The jovial director described the new film as "action, action, action and lots of sex and drugs…There is lots of violence against rich folks…and the kids take advantage of the situation to have fun with a few orgies."