Movie of the Day

Play Dirty

(Andre De Toth, 1968)

A violent absurdist war film that pits Michael Caine & a band of cynical criminals against Rommel in North Africa. Feel like you've heard that one before? Well, you haven't. 

A late-period masterpiece from 50s genre director Andre De Toth, Play Dirty is an overlooked classic. De Toth, who helmed some of the great B-Westerns of the 50s & 60s, as well as a fine horror film (House of Wax) & a couple of inventive film noirs, re-emerged firing on every cylinder in 1968 for this ultimately downbeat, absurdist British war film. There are moments that prefigure Peckinpah (brutal violence & a scene where villagers watch a scorpion battle a bonfire), some reverential nods to John Ford (The Searchers & She Wore a Yellow Ribbon are referenced lovingly) & an utterly sophisticated manner of indulging Vietnam-era malaise while still making a riveting WWII action film. In fact, Play Dirty renders the anachronistic subcultural smirk of Kelly's Heroes (which I also love) seem patently juvenile & makes the anti-hero antics of The Dirty Dozen seem polite & naively patriotic.More miraculous, De Toth captures the ennui without the tone of the film ever becoming self-righteously grim.

Set during WWII in North Africa, Play Dirty manages to include characters straight out of Paul Bowles' Tangiers stories -- two kief-addicted flaming homosexuals, cynical poppy-runner expatriates & a raft of other intelligent but lost souls who -- because they know the desert & have few qualms about the distinction between murder & warfare -- get caught up in the British campaign against the Nazis to avoid long prison sentences. Although Michael Caine is the ostensible star of the movie, it's Nigel Davenport (A Man For All Seasons, Look Back in Anger, Peeping Tom) who runs the military operation -- an epic, mordantly exotic trek across the desert to blow up a Nazi fuel hub. Michael Caine plays their Captain superior but we're almost an hour into this remarkable film before we see him as anything but an unwary prig, a chess--playing martinet not unlike Henry Fonda in John Ford's Fort Apache. Mostly unobtrusive, but often wildly expressionistic photography -- think the zoom-happy renegade verite chic of Altman films melded with the colorful artifice of early Nicholas Ray or Robert Aldrich -- from another revivified old-timer, Edward Scaife, turns the jeep ride across North Africa from surreal to infernal to hallucinatory without so much as one ragged seam. The scene where the outfit (only Caine is an actual British soldier) finally confronts the sandstorm-swept Potemkin's Village they've been sent out to destroy is equal parts Wizard of Oz & Samuel Beckett, a truly inspired set-piece unrivaled by any war movie this side of Douglas Sirk's Erich Maria Remarque adaptation A Time to Live & A Time to Die. There's even an ubiquitous late 60s rape scene that begins as unpleasantly as any 42nd Street Grindhouse roughie & then about-faces brilliantly into light humor.

This is highly recommended. One wonders why Quentin Tarantino would want to have a go at a piece of really sketchy cheese like Inglorious Bastards when this brutal, funny & often amoral war movie remains vastly unseen.