"Play Dirty" is a witty, acerbic, gorgeously ugly film that says something a lot of people don't want to hear but internalize every day: War is a feature of life, not a bug. We decided it was an acceptable price to pay for living. Somewhere out there, someone's being bombed out of their homes, hounded by US-backed cadres, marching towards infinity to make room for a superpower if they survived the barrages and bullets. You rarely see the truth laid bare, but we get to see it in our art because something else is also true: you can't convince the public of the necessity to stop warfare because it happens to be immoral. Lots of things are immoral; we fight them, or we don't, and war is too intrinsic to American life to fight. It's what we tell ourselves that keeps us free.
André de Toth fled Hungary before the Second World War and relocated to the US, where he made Westerns and films noir attacking American complacency in its everyday iterations, a more sly, less expressionistic Fritz Lang, who allowed his audience to put together puzzle pieces and see the picture of corruption ourselves (to quote Martin Scorsese, his most high profile disciple today, "Can you find the wolves in this picture?"). But he never made anything half as dark as "Play Dirty" in America. He needed censorship to relax, attitudes to change.
"Play Dirty" is the first film of the 1970s, made in the image of Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen," which bests it for sheer acrimony and ballsiness. A final kiss-off from a one-eyed poet of treachery and torture. A man who saw everything, forgot nothing, and cowered before no one. This director knew war was not natural, not what man was meant to create, and yet we cannot stop. We cannot stop.
