Play Dirty

Watched most of this on the Family Net channel on TV the other night. A fine WWII movie from 1968 with Michael Caine. I recorded it and then watched it later so I could skip over the ads, which were considerable. Unfortunately, Verizon & Family Net were not communicating well, so the recording stopped about a half hour from the end. I'm going to have to go rent it or get it from the library if I want to see the rest of it, and I do. The same movie is playing on TV again in a couple of weeks, so I could just wait till then to watch it, EXCEPT Family Net not only didn't get the time right, they didn't get the name of the movie right either, so who knows what's going to be playing in a couple of weeks. Maybe What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? is just their code for some old war movie.

This movie (Play Dirty) concerns an irregular group in North Africa run by an oddball dude, who avers that "war is a criminal enterprise, so I choose to fight it with criminals". And he's got some good ones. No panty waist pick-pockets and bar room brawlers here. We've got guys who would be perfectly happy to cut your throat for the change in your pocket. But where did they get the name? Perfectly heinous.

Their mission is to sneak 200 miles behind enemy lines and blow up a German fuel depot. There have been a dozen missions before this that all ended with getting most of their people killed, but they have finally managed to get some photos of their objective. So we have people who have been here before and survived, and we have an objective, but we also get a BP (yes, the same British Petroleum that is currently to blame for the mess in the Gulf) engineer in the form of Michael Caine. He has been made an officer. He has no combat experience. So the vets get to babysit the greenhorn.

Four you four wheel drive junkies, there is an interesting scene where they haul their vehicles up a steep hill using steel cables. Then there is the trek across the desert, which includes getting stuck in the sand alternating with bouncing across rocks. The ground is flat, but it is covered with six inch rocks every foot or so. There is no way to avoid them, so it is crawl, bump, crawl, bump, crawl, bump endlessly. That could pretty much ruin your day.

They finally reach their objective only to have a sand storm come up. The two leaders confer and decide that the storm would be perfect cover for their attack. I mean, nobody in their right mind would go out in a storm like this. Walking up to the depot they encounter a mine field, but the wind has blown away the top layer of sand and exposed the mines so they are easy to avoid. They get into the depot and Caine sees a soldier standing up next to a truck. He sneaks up behind him and stabs him with a knife only to find that the guy is full of straw. Now we see the wind blowing panels off of the fuel storage "tanks". The whole thing is a fake. There are no enemy soldiers here, and there is no fuel.

Now what do they do? The criminal leader is all for bailing out, finding a boat and getting out of there. But Mr. Caine insists they should look for the real fuel depot and destroy it. And my recording ended! Bah! And it was such a good movie, too.

Now if my kids ever ask me What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?, I can tell them a story from this movie. I mean it was so real it was like I was there. Sure, Pops.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.