A World War II film that goes beyond your standard covert military manoeuvres, using deliberately (and unashamedly) amoral characters as a way to draw attention to the idea that, at its core, war is a criminal enterprise. Play Dirty has, despite its title and penal battalion concept, more in common with the anti-imperialist spaghetti westerns than the Robert Aldrich film that its title is so obviously riffing on. André de Toth's film, working from a screenplay co-written by the director (credited as Lotte Colin) and Melvyn Bragg, portrays the British class system as a closed-off hierarchal arrangement that generates just as much danger for this Allied out-group as the Afrika Korp troops crawling all over the continent. Recalled from a cushy post logging ships as they sail into port, Michael Caine's Captain Douglas is tasked with leading a group of mutinous convicts on a suicide mission to detonate a fuel dump critical to Rommel's mechanised expansion.
Disguised as an Italian desert patrol, Douglas leads his group of expendable, multinational, saboteurs - the team's ranks include a Cypriot, a pair of lovesick pickpocketing Senussi, and Nigel Davenport as an Irish second-in-command who will only support Douglas if there's a cash incentive in play - ahead of an ill-fated British truck battalion expected, by some well-insulated officers, to actually complete the mission. Although poised for all manner of creeping confrontation on these sifting sands, Play Dirty largely generates its excitement out of the environment itself: jeep wheels regularly stick and sag in this desolate wilderness; while a steep sandstone incline requires a creative solution that gives these troops a fleeting glimpse of camaraderie. A pitiless trek structured around the strange self-reliance of deep cover commando forces, de Toth's film is a thoroughly amoral adventure that, really, only wobbles when a particularly sour sequence of attempted rape terminates in a sight gag straight out of a Richard Lester sex comedy.
