- Dueling Movies: Play Dirty released only a year after The Dirty Dozen, and was castigated for being a ripoff of it even though they have very little in common beyond the assemble-the-team concept which sends a group of criminals on a suicide mission. Even today, any retrospective of the film is obliged to go into detail on why the author feels it's better or worse than The Dirty Dozen.
- Troubled Production: The film was originally going to star Richard Harris alongside Caine, but he quit or got fired (he claims the script changed from what he signed up for, but others say he would often go days without showing up and refused to get a military hair cut) and sued for payment. It was originally directed by Rene Clement, but he wasn’t able to put anything together and eventually left, being replaced by executive producer Andre de Tothe. The script was constantly rewritten during production, and the actual process of shooting it was so miserable that Caine put into his contract that he would never film in Spain again.
- What Could Have Been: The original ending according to Michael Caine:
”I remember how it ended originally, they're taken prisoner by the British, and obviously all the explanations come out, they go back and are court-martialled. But that was another fifteen minutes.”
