If you watched Play Dirty even if you just noted the title and the fact that it’s a war picture you’d probably have a fairly good chance of pinpointing the year in which it was made. This is Vietnam-era filmmaking at its most ironically pointed.
There are no heroes in Play Dirty. One character, Michael Caine’s Captain Douglas, makes a decent enough stab at it, but even then, when his fellow officer Captain Leech (Nigel Davenport) accuses him of glory hunting, he hardly puts up an impassioned defence. This is 1967’s The Dirty Dozen a year later and taken to the next realm, where there’s no moral redemption for its motley bunch of criminal mercenaries.
In fact, that’s one of Play Dirty’s biggest problems. With a film like The Dirty Dozen you at least came to cheer on the freaks and geeks that crewed Major Reisman’s suicide mission I’m still heartbroken every time I watch Telly Savalas’s Maggott give in to his baser desires. In Play Dirty, Captain Douglas’s crew of misfits are hardly given any character at all, which means you don’t really give a toss when they each meet their individual fate.
Thankfully, things are a little better with Douglas and Leech, the two men whose personal conflict threatens to tear apart a British mission to travel deep into German occupied North Africa and destroy a critical fuel dump. Leech is like his men, an ex-convict bailed out of prison to ply his ruthless skills on the battlefield. Douglas on the other hand is a slightly reluctant leader, an engineer on secondment from British Petroleum.
It’s never properly explained why Douglas doesn’t just choose to play second fiddle to the experienced Leech he does after all object to being moved away from his cushy port posting. Still, once the mission is on its way, Douglas’s intention to lead a group so clearly aligned to Leech creates some palpable tension.
And with Play Dirty that’s what you talk about: tension, rather than action our group barely fires a shot throughout the whole film. That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t some great set pieces. The best comes relatively early on, when Douglas orders the men to winch their vehicles up the crumbling side of a mountain ravine. You know that the captain’s standing with the men depends on the outcome of his decision, and its nail-biting stuff as each of the jeeps is precariously pulled to higher ground.
As with any war film made in the Vietnam era with the obvious exception of The Green Berets there are plenty of kicks coming the audience’s way. Leech’s men are utilised to illustrate the almost carnal nature of warfare and as perverted as their behaviour becomes at times, which includes rape and the looting of allied soldiers, Leech himself rarely pulls them into line, and Douglas, the moral centre of the film, eventually becomes inured to, and even adopts, some of their ghastly methods.
It’s solid stuff, and a late underlining of the subtext by writers Geroge Marton, Lotte Colvin and Melvyn Bragg is brutally nihilistic, but you can’t help but feel that in all this stuff producer Harry Saltzman and director Andre de Toth ultimately forgot about the film’s top line. There’s just not enough going on during the Play Dirty’s middle section to keep the audience truly involved. The filmmakers fail to effectively raise the stakes for the characters, and so their trip across the desert is interesting but never enthralling. What happens when the group finally reach their target is another neat twist on the nature of modern warfare, but the following action payoff isn’t as gripping as it should be.
For their part, Caine and Davenport do a good job, particularly the latter, who has the greater amount of character to play with. Caine works his stiff gentleman shtick that was so much the mark of his early career, making the underwritten Douglas more compelling than he otherwise would be, but Davenport proves himself a true force of nature. His Leech would be the perfect man to fight alongside, if only you could shake the inkling that he might choose to cut your throat at any given moment. It’s these two who ultimately lift Play Dirty above the war film rank and file, but only just.
I say:
Despite being well ahead of its time, Play Dirty sometimes mines its subtext to the detriment of both character and plot, meaning you can’t ever really get totally behind this dirty dozen eight.
See it for:
Caine’s great, but Davenport obviously knows a good character when he’s handed one. A very underrated actor.
For more movies like Play Dirty (1969) visit Hurawatch.
Also watch: