The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Moderate violence

The Dirty Dozen remains one of the most popular war films ever to grace the silver screen - a reputation that not even three bad made-for-TV sequels in the late '80s could tarnish. A quintessential "guys' movie", The Dirty Dozen is best remembered for its tightly choreographed action sequences and testosterone-boosted storyline, but it was also one of the first movies to show the darker side of war - that the best soldiers are often society's outcasts, the sociopaths and misanthropes who kill and rape. War is not civilized, and there's no place for order or manners amidst the carnage of a battlefield. The Dirty Dozen has always been highly regarded by both war movie fans and action fans alike. The movie's deeper thematic material is left in the subtext, allowing those who prefer to ignore it to do so comfortably. Over the years, The Dirty Dozen has spawned numerous copycat productions - everything from the aforementioned sequels to a British science fiction TV series by the name of Blake's 7. And the passage of decades has only strengthened the film's reputation - so much so that in 1993's Sleepless In Seattle, when Tom Hanks is called upon to name the ultimate guys' movie, he invokes The Dirty Dozen.