Play Dirty (1969) on Netflix
In North Africa, Colonel Masters has one last chance to save his raiding unit of convicted criminals: destroy an Afrika Korps fuel depot. He picks Captain Douglas to join the patrol.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb6.8/104,259 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
During the Second World War, Captain Douglas works for BP and is seconded to the Royal Engineers, where he looks after the fuel that reaches the British Eighth Army in North Africa. Colonel Masters runs a raiding unit staffed by convicted criminals. After a run of failures, Brigadier Blore hands Masters a final mission: wreck an Afrika Korps fuel depot or see the unit disbanded. Masters must take a regular officer along and chooses Douglas for his technical knowledge, against Douglas's wishes. Leech, a convicted criminal taken out of prison, holds operational command. The men drive into the desert in armed jeeps kitted out as an Italian Army patrol, with the Tunisian Sadok, the Greek smuggler Kostas Manou, the Cypriot Kafkarides and the Arab guides Hassan and Assin.
Cast
- Mohsen Ben Abdallahas Hassan
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Play Dirty (1969)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Richard Harris left London for Spain on 16 February 1968 to join the production, but said the script handed to him differed from the one he had agreed to do, so he quit the film and sued the producers for his reported £150,000 salary.
- Other productions, including Shalako, were shooting in Almería alongside Play Dirty, and Michael Caine recalled there were only six sand dunes there, with units shovelling up horse manure and erasing hoof prints left by westerns. He said he later had a contract clause barring him from working in Almería.
- After Nigel Davenport replaced Richard Harris and Nigel Green replaced Davenport, director René Clément resigned and executive producer André de Toth took over, saying Clément wanted a "poetry of war" while Saltzman wanted "blazing guns and roaring tanks".
- Saltzman planned to shoot the film in Israel and sent André de Toth to scout the country, but René Clément wanted Morocco or Algeria; Saltzman refused to go to North Africa and Clément refused Israel, so it was shot in Spain's Tabernas Desert.
