Play Dirty

"War is a criminal enterprise. I fight it with criminals." - Col. Masters (Nigel Green), in Play Dirty Everyone plays dirty in Play Dirty (1969) - the characters, the screenwriters, and the director, too. "Forget the medals, Throw away the rule book," ordered the posters, and sure enough, that command applies not just to the men on screen but to the audience watching. The result is one of the great under-known combat pictures, one which no less than Martin Scorsese has called a guilty pleasure. Right off the bat, Play Dirty tells us things will be different. A German-uniformed man (Nigel Davenport) drives a jeep across a rickety desert landscape with a dead body in the passenger seat. A German song, "Lilli Marlene," blares from his radio. As he approaches a checkpoint, he switches his German hat for a British one and changes the music to "You Are My Sunshine." It's a British checkpoint and the man responds to the soldiers suprisingly sarcastically, though he is clearly British and is let through... Very quickly, then, what we think we know to be the case is undermined by what actually happens, and we learn not to believe or trust everything we see - a quality which will keep us on edge throughout the entire movie and will ultimately convey much of the film's meaning. Because Play Dirty deals with a group of fighting men who are all despicable former criminals and convicts, the movie was and still is often compared to The Dirty Dozen (1967). It's an unfair comparison; the two pictures are more different than similar. Not only does Play Dirty not develop the convicts' characters anywhere near as much as The Dirty Dozen, but it conveys a degree of cynicism and nastiness that The Dirty Dozen never really tries to approach. Further, as film historian Jeanine Basinger has pointed out, the men in Play Dirty never come together to form a cohesive group, instead remaining unsympathetic loners. More generally, The Dirty Dozen unspools as a fairly traditional, albeit superb, Hollywood action flick, while Play Dirty is far more edgy and disturbing, right on through to its final frames. Play Dirty gives us the traditional elements of a WWII combat movie - hero, group, military objective - but turns all three upside down in a big way. The story, possibly inspired by the real-life Popski's Private Army (a British reconnaissance unit in northern Africa during WWII), has the underqualified Capt. Douglas (Michael Caine) being plucked from his cushy job to lead a unit deep behind enemy lines to blow up a Nazi fuel depot. The group is made up of thoroughly amoral, vile men operating outside of the mainstream military. They look to their own Capt. Leech (Nigel Davenport, outstanding in a role originally meant for Richard Harris) as their true leader, and Davenport and Caine spend the film at odds over power until Caine gradually succumbs to the group's "dirty" tactics and is accepted. The objective [SPOILER ALERT!] turns out to be a fake, a decoy, until the men decide for themselves to find and destroy the real one. What they don't know, however, is that their superiors back at base have decided that the real objective is now no longer an objective at all, and the tables are now turned against the group in a deeply cynical way. The characters in Play Dirty act out of greed or selfishness instead of national pride or military correctness. The iconography of military uniforms is subverted, too; several times in the movie, characters wear the uniforms of the enemy, which Jeanine Basinger has written "is considered a despicable thing to do" in war and war movies. Even a harrowing attempted-gang-rape sequence, astonishingly enough, is successfully capped by a humorous, ironic - and thus totally unexpected - image. All these and more are examples of a movie that twists, subverts, and comments upon what we all already know from countless other war movies - and it never loses its entertainment value in the process. Director Andre de Toth would have argued with the word "entertainment." Asked about Play Dirty's comparison to The Dirty Dozen, he said, "The Dirty Dozen was a good and entertaining motion picture. 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. I wanted to disturb, to open closed eyes and scramble brains, hoping they'll think." Think we do, even as we enjoy one fantastic scene after another. Two memorable examples: a drawn-out affair in which jeeps are hauled up a steep cliff by means of pulleys and cables, and a well-edited burial montage which, according to de Toth, was originally scored with "the happy voice of a children's choir. The harsh contrast to the macabre scene disturbed [the producers] 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." MGM, in association with Fox Home Entertainment, has issued the DVD at a good, low price and in a pristine, anamorphic (2.35:1) transfer. Don't miss this one. For more information about Play Dirty, visit MGM. To order Play Dirty, go to TCM Shopping. by Jeremy Arnold