Play Dirty

Not nearly as good as Aldrich's THE DIRTY DOZEN but a fairly entertaining war film nonetheless. Caine plays a novice British Army captain assigned to lead a band of ex-convicts into the African desert to destroy a Nazi oil depot 650 miles behind Rommel's front lines. Of course, the inexperienced captain must earn the respect of his somewhat surly men the hard way--which he eventually does--and the team becomes a crack unit. Unfortunately, the British High Command has also assigned a regular army unit to the same mission, figuring that Caine and his crew will most certainly be killed. (They are just being used as a diversion for Rommel's troops.) Surprisingly, it is...