Play Dirty

"Play Dirty" has been one of many films in which hasn't exactly benefitted the career of Michael Caine. The above movie wasn't particularly successful at the box office and I'm hardly surprised. The story tends to resemble something out of "The Dirty Dozen" film - except that one is ten times better. Michael Caine merely sleepwalks his way through the film as he usually does (no doubt thinking how much money he was being paid). Nigel Davenport as the soldier who accompanies Caine on their suicide mission is somewhat better. A highly skilled actor by the name of Nigel Green is wasted in his brief on-screen appearance at the film's beginning. Why on earth wasn't he written into the screenplay properly? Harry Andrews is on hand to do his usual as the imposing commanding officer. He was a highly efficient character actor of many years standing. Admittedly, there are a few fairly good action scenes but they can't possibly atone for all the tedium that takes precedence in between. The downbeat ending doesn't help either.

As memory serves, 1968's Play Dirty has Michael Caine leading a bunch of commandos toward some derring-Dirty-Dozen-do in WWII North Africa. There were lots of familiar British faces along for the fun, along with sand and bullets and Caine looking pissy. It was all edgy and violent and fascinating to the teenager who watched it on NBC over thirty years ago, but I suspect that if I could find a copy of it now (Amazon doesn't have one, but I haven't tried Ebay--nor would I want to), I'd be repulsed by the cynicism, the gore, and the two gay Bedouins playing slap and tickle with the loot from the many corpses Caine and his crew leave strewn about the desert. Ick. PS: I just saw the unexpurgated version on Netflix. It was better than I remembered, but just by a smidge. I still feel dirty.

In many ways, "Play Dirty" is like taking "The Dirty Dozen" and merging it with the director's cut of "Lawrence of Arabia". The film is about a group of cutthroats and criminals who are on a mission behind enemy lines AND it has TONS and TONS of long and dry (no pun intended) desert scenes where very little is happening. Considering that these two other films were made before "Play Dirty" and are much better films, then you can guess some of my feelings about the film. The film begins with an officer and petroleum expert (Michael Caine) being forced to go on a crazy mission behind enemy lines in North Africa to destroy fuel depots during WWII. I say crazy because the other officer he'll be serving with is a real rogue--and was let out of prison for the mission. This guy has a group of equally nasty rogues who are all experts at playing dirty and NOT abiding by the rules of warfare and this includes dressing up as Italian soldiers. Too much of the film is spent on the team's trek across the desert...way too much. It makes for a terribly paced film and it only improves later in the film when they FINALLY make it to their objective. Additionally, unlike "The Dirty Dozen", most of the rogues (with the exception of their leader, played by Nigel Davenport) have no real personalities and are nothing like the cast of "The Dirty Dozen". They are just faceless scum. The ending is decent because it is very different--otherwise, I thought the film amazingly dull. Best moment of the film--when Davenport says "I didn't like the tea". Worst moment--when EVERYONE stood near the guy as he disarmed a German booby trap! Why, in the name of all that is holy, didn't they take cover...FAR away from the guy with the pliers disarming the bomb?! And, why didn't anyone tell the two gay guys that the place was booby trapped so they wouldn't blow themselves up?! Also, although it worked out well in the end, there is an attempted rape in the film that is pretty disturbing--particularly for folks in the audience who have themselves been victims, so be forewarned. By the way, if you care, a lot of the equipment in the film is neither German nor Italian. This is no surprise, as little of it survived the war. The German halftrack vehicles, for instance, are American M3 models.

Play Dirty (1969) You almost have to see this anarchic, nasty, selfish, brutal WWII movie as a comment on Vietnam, and on war. It's 1969. At first you think Michael Caine, for all his talent, is miscast, but the odd displacement of his character among a lot of very hardened, serious men is part of what works. This is not like any WWII you've seen. It's an odd mixture of hardship, tedium, humor, and straight up masculine grit. It's set in the Sahara, so dunes and sand and dry nasty weather rules. There is a mission at hand, and these men have to be unorthodox and ruthless to succeed. But there are long stretches of just traveling and conquering the desert, of going day after day through storms and lack of storms. There is also fighting amongst the men, a somewhat horrifying (and unnecessary) attempted rape, some bloody carnage of natives, and of Germans, a long twenty minutes of Fitzcarraldo heroics with some cables, and so on. But in the end, it really does capture something essential of war, including the nonsense of some of it, and the lack of rules, and the lack of personal safety that comes from chaos, and the difficulty of companionship and trust.

Not the best of war movies, and the type of story line that's been done before... However, I was fascinated to note that the screenplay was written by Melvyn Bragg who, in the 1990s, went on to produce a great documentary about the English language. How the world turns... Anyway – this effort does have some great and witty lines delivered by Caine and Davenport as the two rival captains on a mission to blow up a German petrol dump in the Libyan desert during the second world war's African campaign. On that basis, it's somewhat pedestrian – many scenes of travelling through desert areas, naturally; getting bogged down in the sand, naturally; meeting and killing Arabs at an oasis, naturally; and generally verbally fighting with each other, as each tries to assert their individuality. Where the narrative is different, however, is first, the twists in the story that produce some worthwhile surprises; second, the grittiness of the situations that serve to highlight the totally amoral attitudes of all concerned; third, the irony of the true nature of the German dump; and finally, the tongue-in-cheek chutzpah of the ending which, for me, almost turned the whole movie into a very long shaggy-dog story. I could imagine Bragg having a real giggle about it as he wrote it – and that's not maligning him at all. All of the main characters provide suitably professional performances, Caine once again with that disdainful and bored attitude reminiscent of his role in Zulu (1964) as Lt. Gonville Bromhead; Nigel Davenport gives a terrific performance (he outshines Caine, in my opinion) as Caine's rival; while the likes of Harry Andrews and Nigel Green exemplify the vacuous and glory-seeking nature of all military top brass. The standout performance, however, goes to Vivian Pickles as the German nurse who shows all the British soldiers what it means to stand up for your rights – not to be missed. As war movies go – perhaps anti-war – it's well done, but not without its faults, particularly some of the gaps in the narrative, sloppy editing and inexplicable jump cuts. Maybe, on TV, I saw a badly edited version to allow for too many commercial breaks? I'll assume so. Recommended for those who like war action.

A virtually unknown British masterpiece from the 60's. Its cynical and bleak portrayal of men in war is only matched by its lack of notoriety which is a shame considering how powerful the films message is. Admittedly Caine is a little wooden as the straight laced British Officer, but it is the much less known Nigel Davenport who steals the show as the hard bitten second in command. The films cynicism is the sum of it's ending which is suitably negative but still unsuspected. With all the flag waving war films out there its good to see the odd one which suggests the end never justifies the means.

The underlying idiocy here is to rip off the premise from "The Dirty Dozen ", which had had huge success just 2 years earlier, but to give the movie some half-baked bleedin'-obvious message about dirty war always being waged on both sides of any conflict. The trouble is, you just can't have it both ways. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't f*rt and keep it inside too. You either make a fairly unrealistic but fun semi-comedy about a bunch of criminals going on a suicide mission OR you use the movie to make some "grand" statement about the inherent ugliness of the decision-making process in the upper army tiers, i.e. some tired old morality tale. For people who consider this movie to be "realistic", I have these five words: "Alice In Wonderland" and "Fantasia" i.e. you have seen them far too often. The LOOK of PD may be realistic; there is no denying the visual quality. The story, however, is anything but. For example, Leach's baffling decision to sabotage Caine's attempt to bring the jeep over the hill. Leach – for whatever unexplained reason – decides to not unload the supplies off the vehicle as Caine had ordered, thereby allowing a perfectly good jeep to be destroyed, plus much of the supplies on it. What the hell was the point of that? Motives, anyone? I'd truly like to hear whatever theories, i.e. any fanciful (desperate) spins, which fans of PD can give me here to justify that dumb nonsensical act. Leach was portrayed as the ultimate survivalist, always looking out for himself first (and Caine second, due to the reward), so it made zero sense for him to diminish the chances of the mission succeeding, thereby also increasing the risks to his own life. This is moronic writing, and has absolutely nothing to do with the alleged "realities of war" that PD supposedly stands for. It was a childish act, perhaps, but that would totally out-of-synch with Leach's rather clear-cut character. Worse yet, that entire sequence lasted for an eternity. Why does the viewer have to watch the boring details that are entailed in transporting a jeep over a hill? That seemed like the kind of padding that is usually found in cheesy 50s/60s B-movies and "arty" Euro-trash films with a thin or non-existent story. (Like those endless climbing sequences in "Lost Continent" or "The Mole People".) PD could have been cut by at least 15-20 minutes - that's how much it drags at times. It's as though the director was so keen on making the most of shooting on location, that he couldn't bring himself to slash some scenes that show the desert in all its cinematic glory. He basically sacrificed the movie's pace in favour of the scenery. But this is isn't supposed to be some slow, meditative flick about existentialism or any other such pretentious twaddle. It's a bloody war film. Caine and Leach, who had been clever up to the point of blowing up the German supplies base, are suddenly reduced to utter retards when they walk straight into an ongoing military operation (Monty's invasion), waving a white flag that is smaller than a hamster's bum. Of course they could get killed by friendly fire! Even a person who knows nothing about the military, wars, or surrender would have figured that it's safer to wait out the invasion, to hide until the invading army is done with their invading, which would have taken no more than another hour (or hours at the most), and THEN "surrender". At the very least they could have taken off their German uniforms: it wasn't anyway as though they were going to freeze in Northern Africa, in the middle of the day, without these clothes. Dumb.

"Play Dirty" is one of those rare films that reassures you that some filmmakers are willing to try something different with a tired genre. The World War Two epic has been done a thousand times, but this one is different. Michael Caine is his brilliant self, supported ably by Nigel Davenport and Nigel Green in this film which has drawn comparisons to the "Dirty Dozen" but, I believe, strikes ground of its own. Andre de Toth directs with a style that was well before its time, giving this film something others lack - longevity. A top flick worth seeing. *Three and a half stars*

Play Dirty is quite possible the worst war movie I've ever seen, and considering I've seen a lot, that's saying something. Unless you like terribly upsetting films that don't seem to serve a purpose, I can't really recommend it. Michael Caine, Nigel Davenport, Nigel Green, and Harry Andrews star in this Desert War film, involving British soldiers, Italian soldiers, North African terrain, and Nazis. There are sneak attacks and plans and supposedly suspenseful scenes, but all of that is overwhelmed by the upsetting violence and treatment of the one female character who inexplicable finds her way into the middle of the soldiers' camp. You can only imagine what atrocities befall her. I'm sure it's a very realistic representation, but it's hardly fitting to be included in a film that's meant to entertain. Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, due to upsetting violence, I wouldn't let my kids watch it. Also, there may or may not be a rape scene.

Play Dirty surprises because of how 'dirty' it actually gets, and how it doesn't give any easy beats for its characters. It follows the seemingly usual tropes of the men-on-a-mission war flick, where a group of men are selected practically on the basis that they won't succeed in their mission, and that the end goal is to blow something up. But unlike The Guns of Navarone or the Dirty Dozen, Play Dirty puts the position of the British army in this desert scene as greedy and malicious and really only caring about getting to the oil, and surely before the 'decoy' team gets there. It's entertaining but it's not what exactly one would call 'fun' like Navarone. It's a story of unheroic men doing some heroic things and always for the almighty dollar. In the film, Michael Caine is a Captain Douglas in the army- he doesn't look entirely like the army type and no wonder since he was formerly a Petro-exec- who is put in charge of a group to go through rocky terrain in the North African desert to bomb an oil field. Only big snag is that this isn't the first time the mission has been attempted, and Captains have died already. With this in mind, the head guy puts Cyril Leech (Nigel Davenport) in charge to make sure the Captain is kept alive - at a good cost of two thousand pounds. This doesn't mean that Cyril won't get sometimes in the way of the Captains orders, like when they need to pull up their trucks over a rocky mountain ridge and he refuses to unload the trucks. It's an uneasy partnership with their fellow soldiers also not always sure who to follow, especially when coming into some enemy territory, or when they come upon a 'fake' enemy outpost in a sandstorm. Andre De Toth's film is rough and tough, as any men-on-a-mission war film should be, but it has something extra to keep one interested. This is the guts to keep things rightfully violent and shocking (when a mine goes off at one point as another mine is being diffused, it's one of those moments you'll jump in your seat even at home), and at most mildly amusing. The characters aren't very colorful or even terribly memorable, although Caine and Davenport are both fantastic in their parts, often fantastic at being understated (as Davenport's Captain says, "look, listen, don't move, that's the way you survive"). The action is also intense enough but moves at that pace where suspense is genuinely built like in the climax among the oil barrels and the barbed wire. Even a scene involving an attempted rape is shown without any punches pulled, until the one oddly-effective laugh had at the outcome of the scene. It's a forgotten little wonder of the world war two movie, and it's more bitter than sweet with its view of the buck-stops-here mentality of wartime - or rather, as a character points out, how war is "a criminal enterprise", hence having a guy like Cyril, who was in prison for fifteen years until being put to use on the mission. Play Dirty doesn't get really going until twenty minutes in, but once it does it doesn't play safe. 8.5/10