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.