Play Dirty is very loosely based on British special forces units in North Africa. It stars Michael Caine (The Eagle Has Landed, A Bridge Too Far, Too Late the Hero), Nigel Davenport (Chariots of Fire) and Nigel Green (Zulu, Bitter Victory) with Harry Andrews (Ice Cold in Alex, The Hill) playing something other than a sergeant major.

I kind of love Play Dirty.

I like how cool Caine is in this movie and how he works with the other actors, even though I’m not sure any of the characters make that much sense. I love how brutal and unforgiving the desert is—how our heroes don’t just get thirsty or stuck in sand—though they sure do get stuck in sand. I like how nasty, brutish and short the combat is. I like it when Colonel Masters (Green) says, “war is a criminal enterprise; I fight it with criminals.” And I love it when Caine asks him if the positions on a map are Rommel’s, and he replies, “No, those are the positions of the Carthaginians in the year 215 B.C. Desert warfare hasn’t changed.”

You might not love it; you might find it too cynical (it certainly revels in its cynicism) or think there are stretches where nothing happens or not find the characters particularly sensical. You wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you felt that way, but I really enjoy watching this movie, even though it’s flawed.

I keep coming back to the feeling that the movie is just cool; it looks cool, and its attitude is not like other war movies. It’s like Where Eagles Dare for grownups. I need to write a whole essay to explain that idea, but I don’t want to. Where Eagles Dare is a romantic idealization of war and the people involved, with an intricate plot and, eventually, with clear good guys and bad guys. Play Dirty may have no good guys—or the people we think are bad may be good—or good and bad may be inadequate concepts. In both movies you want to be the protagonists anyway because they act and dress cool and have cool guns. Play Dirty somehow meets that childish need I admit I have while not romanticizing war, or at least not over-romanticizing it.

Speaking of cool, Nigel Davenport plays Captain Cyril Leech, who is one of the criminals Colonel Masters has recruited for his legally distinct from the SAS or LRDG group of desert raiders. Leech is an interesting character. He is mercenary enough that he may be working for the Germans, or for whomever strikes his fancy at the moment, or—we don’t know what he’s thinking behind his smirk; he may be a psychopath—and we’re curious.

As the opening credits roll, we see him nonchalantly, which is how he does almost everything, driving a Jeep with a dead British officer in the passenger seat while Leech is wearing a German cap, and “Lilli Marlene” is playing on the radio. Right before a British checkpoint, he switches to a British hat and changes the radio station and “You Are My Sunshine” plays. When he reports to base, the dead officer is revealed to have been shot in the back. When asked how he died, Leech replies, “unexpectedly.” It is all so cool I can barely stand it.

He is mysterious and interesting, and Davenport plays him well, but at the end of the movie we don’t understand him or some of the decisions he makes. It’s not that he remains mysterious; it’s that his decisions don’t seem consistent. The story seems to dictate that he act inconsistently, so Caine’s character can get where he’s going.

Caine’s character, to a lesser extent, is also oddly inconsistent. Captain Douglas of the Royal Engineers is on loan to the military from British Petroleum. We are introduced to him as an outsider, playing chess on a dock while working and answering a superior’s summons in his own good time, but once he meets Leech and his ragtag band of misfits, he takes the role of the by-the-book officer, primarily so he and Leech can be in conflict and then grow to respect and maybe like each other because that’s how these movies work (see Sea of Sand, Run Silent, Run Deep and Windtalkers).

So the basic character conflict of the movie doesn’t make a lot of sense, and this is the main criticism of the film. These interesting characters are sometimes forced to fit in to a generic pattern, and they shouldn’t be.

But I don’t care—Caine and Davenport work well together and Green and Andrews do strong work as well. Much of the time the film subverts or ignores generic patterns. And it’s all really cool.

Andrews and Green have one strong scene that also highlights the cynicism of the film. Andrews, as Brigadier General Blore, focuses on how much money Colonel Masters’ (Green) unit costs (142,00 Pounds) instead of the lives lost–except for three British officers. Green proposes a raid on a fuel dump deep behind enemy lines (that’s what we do in this kind of movie: see Sea of Sand); Blore approves the raid and then immediately double crosses Masters, sending another group on the same mission. He tells its commander that our heroes are a “decoy group” that will clear the path of any difficulties, maybe dying—it’s fine—to increase the main groups chances of success. This move is described as “not particularly pleasant” by the major who will lead the other party.

It’s not maudlin or jingoistic; it’s mercenary and mean but maybe pragmatic. it’s all so cynical, and I love it.

Then we get to the desert and Caine and Davenport battling each other for command of the group and whatever it is exactly Leech is battling for, and I love the scenes in the desert.

This is the most accurate portrayal of the challenges the desert poses I’ve seen, I think. (I mean, I drove through a desert once in an air-conditioned minivan, so I’m not exactly an expert.) It shows the desert as an implacable enemy—they run out of spare tires—not just gas or water. At one point everyone is pushing a Jeep out of deep sand then using a truck to tow it out; then that truck has to be pushed free, then Caine jumps in the Jeep, and it doesn’t go, and he has to hop back out and push. It looks real—it doesn’t look like they staged difficult driving; it looks like we’re following people traveling in the desert who, of course, sometimes get stuck in the sand. It looks frustrating and tedious and exhausting.

And everything has a layer of sand on it, the Vickers and the MG 34s mounted on their vehicles (they’re pretending to be Italian, so they have some Axis equipment) and the sand compass and the Jerry cans, as if the prop department had driven the vehicles in a desert environment for days. Or if, you know, soldiers had. And that looks really cool.

Even the sand compass has sand on it.

In a way it is also some of the most accurate combat I’ve seen. Most of it is short and decisive and includes shooting fallen soldiers, both to make sure they’re dead and so you don’t have any prisoners. It’s not romanticized, even though it sometimes looks cool because of how it’s shot.

This shot is twenty-three years older than the video game Castle Wolfenstein 3D and is really cool.

It has the requisite man stepping on a possible booby trap (see Ice Cold in Alex) with someone carefully wiping away sand to reveal and follow a trip wire, as well as the minefield and barbed wire-protected fuel depot (see Sea of Sand), and it does all of those well; the minefield isn’t the best, but the booby trap, “don’t lift your foot” scene may be one of the best of those.

It has a small, problematic attempted rape scene. The rape fails in a manner that’s meant to be comedic and also save the filmmakers from showing a rape that would likely happen in that situation. And that’s the problem: they introduce a situation then try to dodge it (see Fury). Just like Fury, there’s a glimpse of ugly truth because of a commitment to some sort of realism and then a retreat, so the protagonists can remain sympathetic–or at least not become entirely unsympathetic.

I also don’t love the ending, but it is a good one—there are good, solid and believable twists at the end of the film that fit fine. I just don’t like all of them. This is not like the ending of, say, Hell in the Pacific, which I don’t like because it is flat out bad.

And just now, honestly, it occurs to me that this is in many ways a response to movies like Sea of Sand and Ice Cold in Alex, specifically the latter. They are about heroic struggles against the desert, and Ice Cold in Alex has a good and satisfying ending while Play Dirty has a good and unsatisfying one.

This movie doesn’t make the war or the struggle against the desert seem romantic or ennobling. It tries to say these other movies have been lying when they say it is; the protagonists may try to act nobly, or they just may be trying to please their own caprice. Maybe some of the men who fought were nobly intended, but some weren’t noble even in their intentions, and many were sacrificed to a system that sees them as disposable commodities.

But there is something about the style of this movie that is deeply appealing, it looks real and gritty yet stylish, and I seriously want to watch it again right now.

Recommendation

Try and find a copy of Play Dirty. This is not the easiest thing to do; I don’t know of any streaming service that has it.The version listed below claims to be region-free, but I ended up with a copy that won’t play on most North American systems, so beware, unless you’ve invested in a region-free player, which is kind of a good idea for this hobby.

Gordon Landsborough wrote a number of novels set during the North African Campaign. I like the Glasshouse Gang series, which Play Dirty reminds me of, but it is nowhere near high art.