Directed by André De Toth | Written by De Toth, Melvyn Bragg, Lotte Colin, and
George Marton | 118 min | ▲▲▲ | On DVD
Before the Shane Black movie with the same title arrives on Prime, let me share a few words about a lost Michael Caine picture from the late 1960s. I’ve been catching up with Caine’s back catalogue when I stumble upon them, films like The Whistle Blower and The Holcroft Covenant. This one isn’t on streaming, but a cinepanion had it in his library and we watched it the other day.
Caine is a straight -arrow British soldier, Captain Douglas, assigned to accompany a team of desert rats to blow up a Nazi fuel depot somewhere in North Africa. This mission has been set up to fail by the officers in charge, a chance to get rid of a cadre of mercenary types who’ve been fighting this war too long and no longer recognize the chain of command. That’s at least partly because the men in charge are corrupt as hell.
“War is a criminal enterprise — I fight it with criminals,” says Colonel Masters (Nigel Green), who put this team together. Directly at odds with Douglas is Captain Leech (Nigel Davenport), a genuinely amoral character. Also on this team are two queer Arabs (Mohsen Ben Abdallah and Mohamed Kouka), who bring an unusual counter-culture dynamic to the mission.
The influence of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, released two years earlier, is clear in this picture’s DNA, but what surprises is just now nihilistic this is — a real anti-war picture showing that there are no winners and no honour in war, it’s all a fool’s errand. As Douglas tries to exercise some control over this group — a tense mid-movie set-piece has the team hauling three trucks over a ridge in a real Wages of Fear-styled moment — he invariably fails because these guys refuse to respect him, even if what he’s trying to do makes all kinds of sense.
In this most masculine genre — war action — no surprise the one German nurse these thugs encounter (played by Vivian Pickles) is almost immediately assaulted. One of her would-be rapists is shot in the ass, a wound she treats. That’s the level of humour you’ve got going on here.
One scene in Play Dirty is weirdly a carbon copy of the one that opens The Wild Bunch — torturing a scorpion with fire — which couldn’t be an “homage” because the Peckinpah film was released the same year. The parallels with the legendary western don’t end there, but to go into too much detail would be a spoiler for both 56-year-old movies.
Produced by Harry Saltzman of James Bond 007 and the Harry Palmer films, written by novelist turned TV culture host Bragg, and directed by veteran b-movie maker De Toth (House of Wax), this is a surprisingly effective, and impressively grim, war picture.
