The movie premiered in the US in June 1967 and became the fifth highest grossing of the year. It was also, for a time, one of MGM's top ten moneymakers in its history to that point.

The Dirty Dozen won an Academy Award for Best Sound Effects (John Poyner). Also nominated were John Cassavetes for Best Supporting Actor, Michael Luciano for film editing, and a third nod for Best Sound.

Cassavetes also received a Best Supporting Actor nomination from the Golden Globes.

Michael Luciano was awarded Best Edited Feature Film by the American Cinema Editors USA.

Robert Aldrich was nominated by the Directors Guild of America.

Given the film's success, it's no surprise it was recognized in the annual Laurel Awards presented by Motion Picture Exhibitor magazine: Best Action Performance (Lee Marvin), 2nd place Male Supporting Performance (Jim Brown), 3rd place in the overall Action-Drama category, and a nomination for John Cassavetes for his supporting performance.

The picture won a gold medal in the Photoplay awards presented by the fan magazine of that name.

The Dirty Dozen placed fifth in Film Daily's "Ten Best" list for the year.

With his appearance in this and John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), Lee Marvin became the year's top male box office star.

Robert Aldrich responded to criticism of the film's violence and anti-establishment attitudes: "You see, the Catholics did a strange thing. In their thirty years of running the Breen Office [Hollywood's self-censorship board], they substituted permissive violence for sex. So you could be as violent as you wanted for many, many years. It has only been in the past ten years that violence has been a problem. Now, what I was trying to do was say that under the circumstances, it's not only the Germans who do unkind and hideous, horrible things in the name of war but that the Americans do it and anybody does it. The whole nature of war is dehumanizing. There's no such thing as a nice war."

Lee Marvin also responded to criticism of the film's violence, particularly the scene in which the Nazis officers and the civilians with them are burned alive in the chateau: "Life is a violent situation. Let's not kid ourselves about that. It's not just the men in the chalet who were Nazis; the women were part of it, too. I liked the idea of the final scene because it was their job to destroy the whole group and maybe in some way speed up the demise of the Third Reich. We glorify the 8th Air Force for bombing cities where they killed 100,000 people in one night, but remember, there were a lot of women and children burned up in those raids."

"The Dirty Dozen is the definitive enlisted man's picture. In its view, World War II was a private affair in which officers were hypocritical, stupid or German, and only the dogfaced soldier was gutsy enough to be great. In this film, the lopsided interpretation works largely because of a fine cast and a taut plot that closes the credibility gap. ... Director Robert Aldrich gets convincingly raw, tough performances in even the smallest roles." - Time

"Robert Aldrich has turned The Dirty Dozen into one of the best and least compromising he-man adventure films. It's superbly cast. Everyone is excellent from Lee Marvin down. It's a slam-bang, grown-up adventure story, thumbing its nose at authority and morality and at the compromise that is Hollywood's war cliché. It is cruel and unpleasant on an intellectual level, but that, of course, is war." - Judith Crist, Today show, NBC

"The realization that authority not only has its uses but, for some men, fulfills an aching need is a bitter pill that Aldrich coats with bountiful action, robust humor, and a uniformly superb cast." - Arthur Knight, Saturday Review

"A raw and preposterous glorification of a group of criminal soldiers who are trained to kill and who then go about this brutal business with hot, sadistic zeal is advanced in The Dirty Dozen, an astonishingly wanton war film. ... It is not simply that this violent picture of an American military venture is based on a fictional supposition that is silly and irresponsible. Its thesis that a dozen military prisoners, condemned to death or long prison terms for murder, rape, and other crimes, would be hauled out of prison and secretly trained for a critical commando raid behind the German lines prior to D-Day might be acceptable as a frankly romantic supposition, if other factors were fairly plausible. ... One might wonder, at times, whether [Nunnally] Johnson and [Lukas] Heller were not attempting a subtle exposition of the hideousness and morbidity of war--that is, until [Robert] Aldrich sets the hoodlums to roaring and shooting guns. Then it is clear that the intent of this loud picture is just to delight and stimulate the easily moved." - Bosley Crowther, New York Times, June 16, 1967

"Marvin again delivers a top performance, probably because he seems at his best in a role as a sardonic authoritarian. Charles Bronson, a very capable actor, stands out as a Polish-American who, once affixing his loyalty, does not shift under even physical brutality." - Variety

The Dirty Dozen ... is the beneficiary of extensive advance publicity and excitement and has a strong, virile cast to deliver both the brutalizing violence and grotesque comedy.... It is overlong, uneven, and frequently obscure, but will succeed by virtue of its sustained action, even though what it attempts to say, if anything, remains elusive." - Hollywood Reporter

"The Dirty Dozen is so full of socially deleterious propaganda that everyone connected with it should be ashamed. ... Criminal and psychopathic forms of sadism are made to seem no different from those of war." - Gordon Drummond, Films in Review

"A box office smash despite the moviegoers' growing aversion to the genre in light of Vietnam. That's because it managed to stage exciting, brutal war sequences while simultaneously celebrating misfits, putting down authority figures and the military, and showing war to be a madman's game that can only be fought down and dirty." - Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic (Simon & Schuster, 1986)

"Apart from the values of team spirit, cudgeled by Marvin into his dropout group, Aldrich appears to be against everything: anti-military, anti-Establishment, anti-women, anti-religion, anti-culture, anti-life. Overriding such nihilism is the super-crudity of Aldrich's energy and his humour, sufficiently cynical to suggest that the whole thing is a game anyway, a spectacle that demands an audience." - Time Out Film Guide

By Rob Nixon