Robert Aldrich
78 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
The Suicide Squad (2021)
Directed by James Gunn
influenced by The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Plot Themes Visuals
Indeed, Gunn homages the narrative structure of numerous “infiltrate and escape” ‘60s blockbusters, with The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968) being the biggest touchstones.
Fan enthusiasm has been high leading up to the premiere of The Suicide Squad , James "Don't Call It a Reboot" Gunn's band-of-misfit-supervillains homage to the classic 1967 film The Dirty Dozen (among many other influences).
Taking heavy inspiration from the war films of the 1970s (the original Inglorious Bastards, The Dirty Dozen ) with a heaping helping of The A-Team thrown in, The Suicide Squad wastes no time throwing the viewer into the muck with its clown car of characters in an uproarious bait-and-switch opener involving the Squad’s initial storm into Corto Maltese.
It’s only been a few years since the original Suicide Squad theatrical release, so it undoubtedly feels too soon to revisit this concept, yet it does allow for Gunn’s version to largely dispense with reiterating the premise; it’s obvious that this is still a modernized, superhero-infused take on “The Dirty Dozen.”
Gunn takes inspiration for the film’s style from The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes , Where Eagles Dare , and Platoon .
Everyone gets at least one ‘hero moment’, and the fairly rote subplot about military dissension in Corto Maltese even allows him to sneak in sociopolitical subtext about the dangers of imperialism into what’s a men on a mission movie in the vein of The Dirty Dozen or When Eagles Dare , but one that’s the unique and entirely singular vision of a filmmaker given the blank canvas on which to paint their bizarre, blood-soaked masterwork.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Plot Themes
The Basterds themselves are a movie construct—by way of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Enzo Castellari’s Italian variant The Inglorious Bastards (1978)—reimagined as vengeance-seeking Jews (led by a bizarre hillbilly-ized Brad Pitt) terrorizing Nazis behind enemy lines.
Guess we should also condemn “The Blues Brothers” for the gratuitous use of “Illinois Nazis,” and of course Indiana Jones, and “The Dirty Dozen,” and…
In an attempt to go "The Dirty Dozen" one dirtier, Tarantino piles on yet another macabre flourish, in the form of a swastika that Raine carves into the foreheads of the Germans he doesn't kill.
(The deliberately misspelled title comes from a spaghetti-Western knockoff of “The Dirty Dozen” that provided very slight inspiration for Tarantino’s movie.)
It is The Dirty Dozen on crystal meth, Defiance without conscience, presented by a cocksure filmmaker for whom no project is "only a movie."
What’s best to remember is that this is Tarantino’s “The Dirty Dozen,” an homage to action films of the bygone era that revels in its brutality and humiliation of the enemy.
Which is faintly idiotic, as this is pretty much “The Dirty Dozen” with superpowers — we have very literally seen this movie before.
Based on a DC comic from 1959, this “Suicide Squad” is in effect a superhero remake of the great Robert Aldrich classic 1967 World War II film “The Dirty Dozen.”
While that idea doesn’t make a lick of sense — especially since the U.S. wouldn’t be facing a meta-human threat if overzealous federal agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) hadn’t unlocked these bad guys to form Task Force X in the first place — implausibility alone doesn’t make it any less enticing to imagine how a director of David Ayer ’s caliber might pluck nine of the most ill-behaved characters from the DC stable for an intense spandex-clad, super-powered spin on “The Dirty Dozen.”
Instead of an irreverent, wisecracking version of “The Dirty Dozen” or “The Magnificent Seven,” you get a chaotic CGI/special effects jamboree whose only aim is to take down (not unlike the equally disappointing “X-Men: Apocalypse” ) two ancient underworld spirits pissed off they’re no longer considered gods by mankind.
Imagine “The Dirty Dozen” with super-villains.
It begins as a DC Comics version of “The Dirty Dozen,” slips into “X-Men” territory with talk of “meta-humans,” and ends up feeling like a dress rehearsal for future installments.
In the movie, it's filled with a strange, glowing, possibly atomic device; Alex Cox's Repo Man and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction famously paid tribute to this device.
It introduced me to punk music, and it also referenced many cool older movies, the most obvious being Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
The chaotic result is a gonzo slab of 1980s underground grunge that also riffs on Kiss Me Deadly’s famous apocalypse briefcase, dangerous-youth films like Clockwork Orange, the West Coast hardcore scene, and the cults that have long bloomed in the Southland’s smoggy, deadening warmth.
The tangy preamble -- crumby flatlands, "Oh My Darling Clementine" warbled off-key, Kiss Me Deadly in the trunk of a Chevy Malibu, ominous surf-music thrumming -- sets the free-associational guerilla timbre.
There's a reason the Criterion edition of the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly includes a 4-minute tribute by Cox, considering he borrows that movie's visual of an otherworldly glow for his own uncompromising effort.
And while it pays subtle homage to films ranging from Kiss Me Deadly to A Clockwork Orange to E.T., and has itself influenced the disparate likes of Pulp Fiction, Napoleon Dynamite and Southland Tales , it remains entirely sui generis – which is why it seems as fresh and original today as it was in 1984 (the suitably Orwellian year of its release).
The Expendables (2010)
Directed by Sylvester Stallone
influenced by The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Plot Themes
Assembling a who’s who of action stars from the last four decades, cowriter and star Sylvester Stallone directs a bloodbath that borrows liberally from such male-bonding classics as Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, but offers not a whiff of the tragic fatalism and astute critique of machismo that inform those superior dramas.
VIDEO: Watch the trailer Though he's going for a brawny appeal à la The Wild Bunch or The Dirty Dozen, this boring tale of hired guns is more like Rambo With a Posse.
The film is essentially a variation on Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967), in which Stallone plays Barney Ross, the leader of a renegade unit of gun-for-hire mercenaries who journeys with his 2IC, Lee Christmas (the eternally frowning Jason Statham) into a unnamed Latin American enclave to overthrow a dictator.
In essence, “The Expendables” is John Irvin’s “The Dogs of War” (1980) meets Robert Aldrich’s “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), which is a good idea if you don’t have any ideas of your own.
It does what it has to do but it lacks the grit of something like “The Dirty Dozen.”
When he set about making "The Expendables" - his nostalgic throwback to ensemble action films like "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Wild Bunch" - he made some smart choices.
The rest of the cast, though, makes less of an impression — an intense Michael Pena, an insane Jon Bernthal (who seems to be channeling John Cassavetes from "The Dirty Dozen") and Shia LeBeouf as a Bible-quoting Southerner who always seems to be shedding a single tear, perhaps because he just realized he's Shia LeBeouf.
Although many commentators will no doubt immediately compare the new WW II epic "Fury" to Quentin Tarantino's brilliant "Inglourious Basterds," largely because both films star Brad Pitt as a heavily-scarred, drawling Army man leading his men in a quest to kill as many Nazis as possible, it is actually closer in tone to a straightforward and un-ironic guys-on-a-mission tale along the lines of " The Dirty Dozen " or "Where Eagles Dare," with a heavy dollop of gruesome bloodletting depicting the true horrors of armed conflict that have been de rigueur for the war movie genre in the wake of " Saving Private Ryan ."
Wardaddy is a tough veteran with scars all over his body — as in many of his movies, Pitt takes the opportunity to display his physique — whose comrades-in-arms resemble the usual bunch of misfits seen in most Hollywood WWII movies since The Dirty Dozen.
In the most obvious ways, “Fury” reaches back to the rousing, band-of-brothers tradition of ‘60s and ‘70s war movies like “The Big Red One” or “The Dirty Dozen,” but it also reflects, more than a little, the post-Vietnam shadow that fell across later films like “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket.”
House of Wax (2005)
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
influenced by What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Themes
Meanwhile, the film pays tribute to Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1965) in a bizarre, wax-figure movie theater scene.
Up the road from the cinema (where "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" is the seemingly perpetual offering) is Trudy's House of Wax, a grotesquerie of morbid history and familial horrors.
Armageddon (1998)
Directed by Michael Bay
influenced by The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Plot Themes Characters
The film pays homage to the 1967 film The Dirty Dozen where a band of criminals redeem themselves on a dangerous World War II mission.
Basically this is The Dirty Dozen meets When Worlds Collide: a grubby team of oil drillers headed by Willis is dispatched to save the planet by nuking the asteroid from within.
“The Right Stuff” meets “The Dirty Dozen” in a frenzy of special effects and ear-shattering detonations.
Like "The Dirty Dozen," these so-called "retards" and "criminals" cover all bases of the reluctant cinematic hero: there's decent right-hand man Chick (Will Patton), hot-dogger A.J. (Ben Affleck), space cowboy Oscar (Owen Wilson), horny genius Rockhound (Steve Buscemi), Max the fat one (Ken Campbell), Bear the African American one (Michael Clarke Duncan) and Freddy the expendable one (Clark Brolly).
I hate Armageddon for what it is: the unholy spawn of The Dirty Dozen and Con Air .
This is played out in Lost Highway, with Fred suspecting Renee of marital infidelity and Pete encountering Alice's lust in conjunction with Mr. Eddy as a father figure--a transgression that implicitly ushers in guns, violence, and porn movies--but it's also configured exclusively in terms of noir stereotypes, many of them seemingly borrowed from Kiss Me Deadly (the Robert Aldrich movie, not the Mickey Spillane novel) by way of Barry Gifford, a novelist and noir specialist who collaborated with Lynch on the Lost Highway script.
Jackie Brown (1997)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977)
Characters Visuals
Find here, too, explication of Tarantino's casting choices, from Willis for his spiritual resemblance to Ralph Meeker's asshole hero of Kiss Me Deadly to Travolta for his quality of winsomeness, largely unseen since at least Blow Out if not Saturday Night Fever .
Meticulous attention to detail, tongue-in-cheek establishing cards, a recurring time clock, even a (gratuitous) split screen recalls such caper classics as The Killing, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Twilight’s Last Gleaming.
Run (2020)
Directed by Aneesh Chaganty
influenced by What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Plot Themes
Clearly inspired by the millennium-defining Munchausen by proxy case of all — that of Gypsy Rose Blanchard — “Run” has more in common with “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” than Hitchcock, operating at the clip of a runaway train.
Run brings to mind another horror-thriller about a character in a wheelchair held captive: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
How far things have come since “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” and the cliché of the helpless invalid at the mercy of her caregiver!
That leads to an absolutely batshit crescendo worthy of the legacy of films that Run piggy backs on from What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? and the other Hulu series The Act .
A House of Dynamite (2025)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
influenced by Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977)
Themes Characters
Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove (both 1964) and Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) once seriously considered launches…
…the ’70s had Twilight’s Last Gleaming…
These generic bureaucratic faces seem vacant compared with those in Advise and Consent, Seven Days in May, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, and Thirteen Days…
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Visuals Plot
In the movie, it's filled with a strange, glowing, possibly atomic device; Alex Cox's Repo Man and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction famously paid tribute to this device.
Packed with extras, this new Criterion release sends novelist Mickey Spillane's knuckle-dragging private eye Mike Hammer (played by gruff lump Ralph Meeker) through a cesspool of tawdry twists, all of them hinging on a mysterious box containing a deadly light that fans of Pulp Fiction should find eerily familiar.
The glowing suitcase is a reference to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly.
Tarantino giddily incorporates references to seemingly countless pop-cultural texts (Kiss Me Deadly, Saturday Night Fever, and so on)…
Consider how, hidden somewhere in the subtext amid Jules’ recitation of his passage from Ezekiel and the briefcase containing an awe-inspiring sight of golden luminescence (a nod to Robert Aldrich’s noir Kiss Me Deadly ), there exist hints of a religious theme.
Find here, too, explication of Tarantino's casting choices, from Willis for his spiritual resemblance to Ralph Meeker's asshole hero of Kiss Me Deadly to Travolta for his quality of winsomeness, largely unseen since at least Blow Out if not Saturday Night Fever .
The Lighthouse (2019)
Directed by Robert Eggers
influenced by Kiss Me Deadly (1955), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Visuals Themes
There’s also a homage of sorts to Robert Aldrich’s classic noir nastiness Kiss Me Deadly , as well as a one-eyed seagull that could easily have joined the ranks of Hitchcock’s birds.
Theirs is the grimmest living situation committed to memory since Joan Crawford and Bette Davis duked it out in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"
The female schemer is Wolfmann’s English wife (Serena Scott Thomas), whom Doc interviews briefly in a poolside scene lifted from the pulp masterpiece Robert Aldrich made of Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly .
Back to basics in more ways than one: The first thing we're reminded of is that 007 (played by Daniel Craig) is a killer, less the soign playboy of the later, swanky blockbusters than Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, a thug in a tux.
The Two Popes (2019)
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
influenced by What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Characters
Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins deliver a sit-back-and-marvel double-act masterclass that will be spoken of in the same breath as Travolta and Jackson in Pulp Fiction or Davis and Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins deliver a sit-back-and-marvel double-act masterclass that will be spoken of in the same breath as De Niro and Pacino in Heat or Davis and Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
The set-up of "The Baby" also echoes "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and some of the other "hag horror" California Gothic movies inspired by Robert Aldrich's hit.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Directed by Gareth Edwards
influenced by The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Plot
Reminiscent of ensemble war movies such as The Dirty Dozen, Rogue One gathers together a colourful collection of mismatched characters — including a blind warrior (Donnie Yen) and a rugged pilot (Riz Ahmed).
It’s not quite “Band of Brothers in Space,” but it does channel a little bit from the likes of “The Guns of Navarone” and “The Dirty Dozen” among others.
Soon enough, Rogue One turns into The Dirty Dozen of space operas, a premise that delivers its most satisfying payoff in Edwards’s dazzling third-act conclusion.
But it could also be a classic WWII-style action-adventure, derivative of past classics like The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare.
Modeled after WWII movies like The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare , the film sends a bunch of scruffy expendables on a suicide mission and aims for a harder, more violent edge than other entries in this family-friendly franchise.
Youth (2015)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
influenced by What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Characters
Fonda delivers a high voltage and tantalisingly short cameo; it plays like she’s channelling the spirit of Bette Davis circa What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in a vignette from Mulholland Drive.