Disc Reviews

Play Dirty Review

• 23rd Jan 2015

By 1969 Michael Caine was riding high on a series of successes. Earlier in the 1960s he had been a roommate with London acting stud Terence Stamp before Caine’s fame with the pair becoming the faces of the 60s. Together they womanised their way through the decade. However, following a few successes Stamp’s career waned by the end of the decade whereas Caine’s star shone brighter. He had initial successes in Zulu (1963), the anti-Bond Harry Palmer spy films, Alfie (1966) and of course The Italian Job (1969). He was also enjoying a number of Hollywood successes starring alongside the likes of Shirley MacLaine. To many Play Dirty was a routine war film, but in actuality there is so much more to it. The film was made and sandwiched between two other very similar plotted Hollywood films: Tobruk starring Rock Hudson and George Peppard in 1967 and Raid on Rommel (1971) which starred Richard Burton. These latter two films were routine war films: the first one was a fairly big budgeted film based off a modicum of historical fact with plenty of explosions and action whereas the latter was an adventure war film with some cheap production values as the commandoes attempt to kidnap Rommel but just re-hashed the stock footage of the action scenes in Tobruk.

Part of the problem for many critics with Play Dirty is that it is seen by many as an exploitation British re-hash of the success of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967) (even including the word Dirty in the titles). The plot centres on British commandoes trying to halt Rommel’s North African desert campaign in 1942-43 by attacking the oil facilities to feed Rommel’s tanks and armoured vehicles. North African British high command thinks that the way forward is to use army criminals to go behind enemy lines and blow up these facilities. The officer heading the mission (Nigel Davenport) (himself a former prisoner) will only do it on the insistence that an oil expert and someone who knows the territory will lead. Enter Michael Caine as Captain Douglas, a gentleman officer not a million miles from his Bromhead in Zulu. His problem is he is not a career soldier like Davenport but, unlike Davenport’s officer has ethics and scruples, yet relies on this ragtag and undisciplined bunch to get him through the mission alive. The team, comprising of a half (dirty) dozen n’er-do-wells and thieves head out across the rugged terrain of Libya and face all the usual obstacles one would expect from heat, water, untrustworthy Arabs, enemy patrols and mistrust among the team of scoundrels. However, the dirty and ruthless fighting tactics of the men probably save Captain Douglas on more than one occasion.

One thing this film has the edge on the aforementioned North African campaign war films, as well as The Dirty Dozen is its cynical bleakness – this is particularly clear at the end of the film (without giving anything away). Caine is a little wooden here and rarely his thunder is stolen by both Davenport and Green and the host of British character actors playing the Machiavellian bunch of stiff-upper lip officers. Davenport and Green are often actors barely indistinguishable from each other (the former had appeared with Caine as his crooked boss in The Ipcress File, 1965) – but both shine here. Caine would appear in a similar film with an anti-war message the following year in Too Late the Hero. A clear and bright image, the film would look little worse on a good DVD print. There are no extras.

Chris Hick