9/10
I have watched The Devil’s Brigade six times. It is one of my favorite films and the only thing keeping it from a 10 is the specific reason I will explain in the verdict. The film tells the true story of the First Special Service Force, a joint American-Canadian commando unit assembled in 1942 to fight in Norway. The Norway mission gets canceled. The unit gets thrown at Italy instead. They end up earning the nickname “The Black Devils” from the Germans they terrorize, and that name carries through to the title of the film. The Devil’s Brigade is the underrated cousin of The Dirty Dozen, released a year later in 1968 to less fanfare but, in my view, better material. The story is true. The characters are based on real soldiers. The arc from mutual contempt to brotherhood is one of the most carefully earned in 1960s war cinema.
The 9 reflects what six viewings have confirmed. The cast is excellent. The script knows what it is doing. The character work is detailed in ways most war films do not bother with. The combat sequences are competent without being showy. The film holds at 9 because every time I watch it I notice another small touch I missed before: a line reading, a glance between two characters, a piece of business in the background of a training scene. That is the test of a 9. The film keeps offering something on rewatch, and after six viewings the offering has not slowed down.
The Setup
Lieutenant Colonel Robert T. Frederick is given command of a unit that does not yet exist. The Americans will provide the enlisted men. The Canadians will provide a contingent of their own. The combined force is intended for a winter mission in Norway, attacking heavy water facilities and other industrial targets that would slow the German war effort. The Americans send Frederick whatever they could not place elsewhere: criminals, drunks, malcontents, and men whose records suggest they should have been court-martialed years ago. The Canadians send a polished, well-trained unit of regulars and NCOs who have been training together for months.
The two groups arrive at the same base camp. The Canadians are appalled. The Americans are belligerent. Frederick has to forge a unit out of two groups that initially despise each other and then convince his superiors that the unit is worth deploying. The Norway mission is canceled while they are still training. The brass decides to disband the Force. Frederick fights to keep them together and gets them assigned to Italy instead. The rest of the film is what they do once they get there.
The Cast
William Holden plays Lieutenant Colonel Frederick. Holden was fifty when this film was shot and brings to Frederick the specific authority of an actor who had been playing officers and leaders for decades. He plays Frederick as a man who knows his men are unfit on paper and trusts them anyway. The performance is restrained, often quiet, and rests on the kind of weariness only a star at Holden’s level could deliver without it reading as boredom. He is the calm center of every scene he is in, and the film is built around the trust the audience extends to him.
Cliff Robertson plays Major Alan Crown, the senior Canadian officer. Robertson had just won the Oscar for Charly when this film released, and he brings to Crown a specific bristling propriety. Crown is angry that his polished unit has been merged with what he sees as American garbage. He is angrier still that he has to share command authority with Frederick rather than holding his own command. The performance is the engine of the entire US-Canadian friction. Robertson makes Crown’s resentment legitimate, which is what allows the eventual reconciliation to feel earned rather than imposed.
Vince Edwards plays Major Cliff Bricker, Frederick’s American second-in-command. Edwards was best known for the television series Ben Casey and brings to Bricker the same physical authority he carried in that role. Bricker is the bridge between Frederick’s strategic command and the enlisted men’s daily reality. He is the officer who knows which of his men is a thief and which is a drunk and which is a brawler, and he uses that knowledge to assign tasks accordingly. The performance is one of the most underrated in the film.
Andrew Prine plays Private Theodore Ransom, the bookish American who has been pushed into the Force by superiors who could not figure out what to do with him. Ransom is the audience surrogate, the educated outsider who narrates parts of the experience through reactions rather than voiceover. Prine plays him as quiet and observant, which lets the more colorful characters around him register more clearly by contrast.
Claude Akins plays Rocky Rockman, one of the more dangerous Americans. Akins specialized in heavies throughout his career and Rockman is exactly the kind of role he could play in his sleep. The performance is not subtle. It does not need to be. Rockman is the character who has to register as dangerous within thirty seconds of screen time, and Akins delivers.
Jack Watson plays Sergeant Major Peter Yates, the British Sergeant Major assigned to train the unit. Watson was a fixture of British war films and brings to Yates the specific contempt of a professional non-commissioned officer who has been handed material he considers beneath him. The performance is one of the small pleasures of the film. Watson makes every line of contempt feel earned.
Richard Jaeckel plays Corporal Wilfred Peacock, one of the Canadian junior NCOs. Jaeckel had been doing war films since the late 1940s and Peacock is one of his quieter roles. He is the Canadian who first crosses the line into genuine friendship with the Americans, which makes him a structural keystone.
Jeremy Slate plays Private Hubert Hixon, one of the rougher American enlisted men. Patric Knowles plays the British general who keeps trying to disband the Force. Dana Andrews shows up for a single scene as an American general and gives the film one of its most important pieces of authoritative casting in three minutes of screen time. Carroll O’Connor plays a smaller role two years before All in the Family made him a household name.
The Bar Fight
The scene that does the most structural work in the film. The Americans and Canadians have been antagonizing each other in camp for weeks. The unit is on liberty in a nearby logging town. The Americans walk into a bar. The Canadians are already there. Insults are exchanged. A brawl starts between the two groups. The local lumberjacks, watching the soldiers fight each other, get involved and try to throw all of them out. The Americans and Canadians, finding themselves outnumbered by civilians, stop fighting each other and start fighting the lumberjacks together. They win. They walk out of the wrecked bar arm in arm, the first time the two groups have done anything as a unit.
The scene is structurally perfect. It identifies the obstacle (mutual contempt), introduces a larger threat (the lumberjacks), and uses the larger threat to force the two groups to act together. The act-together moment is the foundation of every subsequent piece of unit cohesion in the film. The brawl earns the friendship in the way no amount of talking heads or training montage could. The film knows what it is doing and the staging of the fight makes it clear: the camera shows individual Americans and Canadians helping each other up off the floor, the kind of small physical kindness that says more than dialogue could.
For Writers
If you are writing an enemies-to-allies arc, study this bar fight. The film does not resolve the conflict between Americans and Canadians by giving them a heart-to-heart. It does not have them realize they have something in common. It introduces a larger external threat that forces them to defend each other, and the act of defending creates the bond. People bond over shared experience faster than they bond over shared values, and the strongest shared experience is the one where you had to save the other person’s life or have your life saved by them. If your characters need to move from antagonism to alliance, find the larger threat that forces the alliance to happen physically. Then trust the physical action to create the emotional shift. The dialogue can come later. The body remembers what it did. The body remembers who was at its back. That is the bond. Everything else is paperwork.
The Taking Of The Town
The other scene that has stayed with me through every viewing. Once the Force deploys to Italy, Frederick is given a target: an Italian town occupied by Germans. The brass expects a standard assault with full casualties. Frederick decides to do something else. He sends a small reconnaissance team in at night to scout. They find the town lightly defended, the Germans confident that no one would be coming up the mountain road they did not bother to guard. Frederick orders the entire Force to climb the mountain in silence, in darkness, in winter. They reach the town before dawn. They take it without firing more than a handful of shots because they are already inside the German perimeter before the Germans know they are there.
The scene is shot with the kind of restraint that makes the audacity feel earned rather than showy. There is no swelling score. There is no slow-motion. The Force moves through the town like a well-trained machine. The Germans wake up to find Americans and Canadians in their rooms with weapons drawn. The brass who had predicted heavy losses are forced to revise their estimation of what the unit can do. The mission becomes the proof of concept that gets the Force its further assignments.
The reason the scene works is that the film has spent the previous hour earning the unit’s competence. The audience has watched these men train. The audience has watched them learn to climb. The audience has watched Frederick build their confidence and discipline. When the climb up the mountain happens, the audience already believes the unit can do it. The film does not have to oversell the moment. The buildup has already done the selling.
Mount La Difensa
The combat centerpiece. The Force is assigned to take Mount la Difensa, a heavily defended German position that conventional forces have been unable to break. The mountain is essentially a vertical cliff face with German pillboxes at the top. The Force is going to climb the cliff at night in winter and assault the position from a direction the Germans believe is impossible.
The sequence is the film’s most extended combat set piece and it is structurally the climax. The climb is genuinely dangerous. The assault, once they reach the top, is brutal. Many of the characters the audience has come to know are killed. The film does not soften the losses. It does not arrange the deaths for emotional crescendo. It lets them happen the way deaths in combat happen: suddenly, often without ceremony, sometimes to the wrong person. The Force takes the mountain. It costs them.
The sequence works because the film has earned every life it spends. The Force has been together long enough that the audience knows who is dying. The character work in the first two acts pays off in the casualty list. By the end of Mount la Difensa, the unit that was barely a unit at the start of the film has become something larger than the sum of its parts, and the cost of becoming that thing is laid out on the mountain in dead bodies that the camera does not look away from.
The Writing
The screenplay was credited to William Roberts and is based on Robert H. Adleman and Colonel George Walton’s nonfiction book about the actual First Special Service Force. The script’s specific strength is restraint. The film resists the urge to make any character a hero in the conventional sense. Frederick is competent rather than inspired. Crown is professional rather than charismatic. The enlisted men are flawed in ways the film does not paper over. The dialogue is functional rather than quotable, which is the right choice for a film about soldiers who would have considered quotability suspicious.
The structural discipline shows up in the pacing. The film spends its first hour on the unit’s formation, training, and internal conflict. It spends its second hour on operations in Italy. The transition is clean. The character work in the first hour pays off in the second hour. The audience knows every man on the mountain by the time the mountain happens. The film does not waste its setup.
The Direction
Andrew V. McLaglen directed. He was the son of Victor McLaglen, an Oscar winner who had been part of John Ford’s stock company, and he had absorbed his father’s craft from the inside. McLaglen specialized in westerns and action films and brought to The Devil’s Brigade the kind of unfussy professional competence that the material needed. He does not show off. He does not use the camera to draw attention to itself. He lets the cast and the script do the work and stays out of the way. That sounds like faint praise. It is not. The film is improved by a director who knew what not to do.
What Keeps It From A 10
The Mount la Difensa sequence is the film’s climax, but the film does not quite know how to end after it. The final fifteen minutes feel like the film is trying to find a graceful exit and not quite landing it. There is a scene of remembrance. There is a scene of the survivors. There is a scene of Frederick walking away. None of these is wrong. None of them is as strong as the moments that preceded them. A great war film knows how to land its ending. The Devil’s Brigade does not quite stick the landing, and that costs it the tenth point.
The other small issue is that the film occasionally tips into sentimentality in a way that the rest of it earns the right to resist. The reconciliation scenes between Americans and Canadians are mostly handled with restraint. A few of them are handled with a heavier touch than the rest of the film deserves. These are small complaints. They are also the kinds of complaints that show up on the sixth viewing rather than the first.
The Verdict
A 9. The Devil’s Brigade is one of the great underrated war films and one of the best examples of how to build an enemies-to-allies arc in any genre. The cast is excellent. The script is disciplined. The combat is restrained. The character work pays off. It is not The Dirty Dozen and it is not trying to be. It is its own film, based on a true story, made with care, and it has held up across six viewings.
I will watch it again. The bar fight will still work. The taking of the town will still work. The climb up Mount la Difensa will still gut me. The ending will still feel slightly underwhelming compared to what came before. The 9 is the right rating, and the reason it is not a 10 is small enough that I forget it between viewings and have to rediscover it each time. That is the test of a 9. The film is great. It is not perfect. The greatness is what stays with me.
FAQ
Is The Devil’s Brigade based on a true story?
Yes. The First Special Service Force was a real joint US-Canadian commando unit formed in 1942 and disbanded in 1944. They saw combat in the Aleutian Islands, Italy, and southern France. They were the forerunners of both the US Army Special Forces and the Canadian Special Operations Forces. The film is based on the nonfiction book The Devil’s Brigade by Robert H. Adleman and Colonel George Walton, who served with the unit. The character names are mostly invented but the major events are real, including the assault on Mount la Difensa.
Why are they called The Devil’s Brigade?
The Germans they fought in Italy referred to them as “the Black Devils” (Schwarze Teufel in German) because of the burnt cork they used to blacken their faces during night raids and the brutal effectiveness of their commando tactics. The name stuck and became the unit’s unofficial designation. The book and film took the name from German reports captured during the campaign.
How does it compare to The Dirty Dozen?
Both films share the structural premise: misfit soldiers assembled into an elite unit, training under a tough commander, executing a dangerous mission. The Dirty Dozen released in 1967 and was a massive box office hit. The Devil’s Brigade released a year later and did less business. The Dirty Dozen is the more famous film. The Devil’s Brigade is, in my view, the better film, because it is based on a true story rather than a fictional one, because its cast is given more room to breathe, and because the friendship that develops between the two factions is more carefully earned than the camaraderie in the Aldrich film. People who love The Dirty Dozen should watch The Devil’s Brigade. The two films work as a pair.
Was Mount la Difensa really taken the way the film shows?
Largely yes, with some compression for cinematic purposes. The First Special Service Force did assault Mount la Difensa in December 1943, climbing the cliff face at night in winter, and they did take the German position after brutal close-quarters combat at the summit. The casualty figures in the film are roughly accurate. The Force lost a significant percentage of its strength taking the mountain and other nearby peaks in the campaign. Survivors of the actual battle have generally praised the film’s treatment of the assault as faithful to their experience.
Who survives in the film?
The film does not provide a clean survivor count the way some war films do. Several major characters are killed during the Mount la Difensa sequence and the surrounding combat. Frederick, Crown, Bricker, Ransom, Yates, and Peacock all survive. Several of the enlisted men do not. The film deliberately makes some of the deaths sudden and unceremonial because that is how combat deaths actually happen. The survivors at the end of the film are diminished from the unit that started training in Montana, which is the point.
Why did the film underperform compared to The Dirty Dozen?
Several factors. The Dirty Dozen had the larger star power, with Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, and Telly Savalas all carrying significant marquee weight by 1967. The Devil’s Brigade had William Holden and Cliff Robertson, who were stars but not the kind of cast that drew the same crowds. The Dirty Dozen also benefited from being first, which meant audiences saw the structural premise as fresh in 1967 and as recycled in 1968. Marketing did not help either. The Devil’s Brigade was sold as a war film, while The Dirty Dozen had been sold as something closer to an action-adventure with a darker edge. The marketing mismatch cost The Devil’s Brigade some of the audience that would have loved it.
Is Andrew V. McLaglen the same as Victor McLaglen?
No. Andrew V. McLaglen is the son of Victor McLaglen. Victor was an Irish-British actor who won the Oscar for John Ford’s The Informer in 1935 and appeared in many of Ford’s films through the 1950s. Andrew became a director, working frequently with John Wayne and James Stewart, and specialized in westerns and action films. The Devil’s Brigade is one of his most respected directing credits along with Shenandoah and McLintock!.
Is the film appropriate for kids interested in WWII history?
The film is rated G in its original release, which sounds shocking by modern standards. The combat sequences include deaths and some intense moments, but the violence is restrained by modern standards and the language is mild. Children old enough to understand the historical context, probably ten and up, can handle the film. It is one of the better introductions to WWII commando warfare for kids interested in the subject because it teaches the human cost of combat without sensationalizing it.
What happened to the real First Special Service Force after the war?
The unit was officially disbanded in December 1944 after sustained casualties had reduced its effective strength. Surviving members were transferred to other units. The unit’s legacy lived on in the formation of the US Army Special Forces (the Green Berets) and the Canadian Special Operations Forces, both of which trace their lineage to the First Special Service Force. In 2013 the United States Congress awarded the Force the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can bestow, recognizing the unit’s contribution to the war and to the development of modern special operations.