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, a film made in the image of Robert Aldrich’s “The Dirty Dozen” that 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.