Within the first few seconds of Play Dirty (1969) you can tell that this isn't going to be a predictable war drama by any stretch of the imagination. The camera captures a jeep racing across the desert with a grimly determined British officer at the wheel and beside him, flopping about listlessly, a corpse in uniform. As the jeep races through the barren landscape, we hear the radio playing the romantic strains of "Lili Marlene." For the entirety of the film, this bleak and bitter image is maintained in both mood and dialogue by director Andre de Toth, who has taken a standard "assemble the team" plot, partially inspired by the success of The Dirty Dozen (1967), and imbued it with an ironic sense of humor and a relentlessly unromanticized view of war.

Set in the North African desert during World War II, Play Dirty stars Michael Caine as an inexperienced British army captain who has been assigned to lead a group of ex-convicts behind enemy lines to destroy a Nazi oil repository. His mission is complicated by a veteran colonel who insists on using old history books for battle strategies and a jaded mercenary who constantly questions Caine's authority. Along the way Caine discovers that their mission has merely been a decoy for the British High Command - a discovery that leads to the film's truly surprising climax, one that is laced with black humor.

Play Dirty was dismissed by most critics upon its release as being little more than a clone of The Dirty Dozen, but now it seems infinitely superior to that film, more mature and accomplished on every level. Michael Caine, however, doesn't relish his memories of working on Play Dirty. In his autobiography - What's It All About?: Michael Caine - he wrote: "The moment that I signed to do the film, (director) Rene Clement had a row with Harry (Saltzman) and left the film. There was a much-vaunted rewrite of the script, which in my opinion was not as good as the original, but we used it anyway....Rene Clement was replaced by Andre de Toth, with whom I had worked briefly when young in A Foxhole in Cairo. Andre came onto the picture so late that even he had no time to do his best work." Caine also hated the punishing climate and isolated location of the film shoot - Almeria, Spain, the place where David Lean shot the train-crash sequence in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and where dozens of "spaghetti Westerns" were filmed. Caine wrote that the Play Dirty set in Almeria was "only about four big sand dunes, which made for disaster when several units were shooting there simultaneously. One day we had a shot where the tanks of Rommel's Afrika Korps were advancing across the desert towards El Alamein, only to be greeted as they rounded a hill by a stagecoach being chased by American Indians coming in the other direction. At the sight of the tanks, of course, the horses panicked and threw their riders, and we had to wait while they were caught and the scene was cleared, and then in would go our local unemployed with brooms and shovels to wipe out the horses' hoofprints and pick up the horsesh*t, of which there was always plenty as the result of the sudden appearance of the tanks on the horses' digestive system." Despite Caine's low opinion of Play Dirty, he gives one of his best performances in the film, proving that actors aren't always the best judges of their work.

As for Andre de Toth, he realized in advance that Play Dirty would be unfairly compared to other more commercially successful war thrillers. In his book, De Toth on De Toth, he wrote, "The Dirty Dozen was a good and entertaining movie....How could it be compared to Play Dirty, a bitter slice of real life and certainly not entertainment?...I wanted to rub our noses in the mess we have created and how we shy away from our responsibility to clean it up....I showed what I wanted, the naked truth, the truth of life and war." Certainly he had some regrets about the film as well, particularly some studio-imposed changes. "Michel Legrand wrote a wonderful score for the scene where the ambushed soldiers are being buried and above them the vultures are circling. The happy voice of a children's choir. The harsh contrast to the macabre scene disturbed them so much that after I delivered what I thought was the finished picture, the children's voices were taken out the day before the release-prints were ordered. Nothing I could do." Yet despite the cuts, Play Dirty is an unforgettable experience and one that is ripe for a major re-evaluation.

Producer: Harry Saltzman
Director: Andre De Toth
Screenplay: Melvyn Bragg, Lotte Colin, George Marton
Cinematography: Edward Scaife
Editing: Alan Osbiston, Jack Slade
Music: Michel Legrand
Art Direction: Thomas N. Morahan, Maurice Pelling, Elven Webb
Cast: Michael Caine (Captain Douglas), Nigel Davenport (Cyril Leech), Nigel Green (Colonel Masters), Harry Andrews (Brigadier Blore), Patrick Jordan (Major Watkins), Daniel Pilon (Captain Allwood), Aly Ben Ayed (Sadok), Enrique Avila (Kalarides), Takis Emmanuel (Kostos Manov), Vivian Pickles (German Nurse).
C-117m.

By Jeff Stafford