Instant Favorite.

A Brilliant Conflict

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Apart from acting performances I couldn't find many redeeming qualities in "Bitter Victory", and WWII movie about British troops in North Africa. The story revolves around Burton and Roman who were once lovers, and her husband, Curt Jergens. The two men are selected for a secret mission led by Jergens, who lacks courage to do what's necessary and is mocked by Burton throughout the picture.It is an action picture but descends into a clash of minds and temperaments at the expense of tension and suspense. It is one of Nicholas Ray's poorer directing jobs and the film lacks good set design as well, leaving the viewer to wonder if all production money was spent on the cast. The musical score was tuneless and inappropriate, but in keeping with the overall sub-par nature of the film. Can't recommend it and wished I hadn't wasted the two hours.

I liked this one quite a bit. First of all Richard Burton was a great actor, and this is the best performance I've seen from him. You can feel his world weariness just dripping off him. Curd Jurgens is also really good in a very demanding role. Basically the whole movie is about their relationship, and they hate each other. There's no big resolution where they suddenly respect each other like you would get in a formula movie. A lot of the point is that Jurgens' character isn't respectable, and the main revelation is that he comes to feel the same way. But he's not villainous, it's easy to empathize with him even though he is sort of a cretin.The cinematography is really extraordinary, especially the scenes in the desert. It reminds me of Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" from a few years later. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an influence. The relationship is also slightly similar to the one between O'Toole and Shariff's characters in that film.The movie is deceptively course and 2 dimensional, like the combat dummies who are the first and last images we see in the film. Stick figures, pretending to be men, setting themselves up as targets. It doesn't ask us to feel sorry for the characters or to admire them, they aren't "larger than life" the way most characters are in war movies. I felt like the movie was saying that war is a natural state of mankind, not some kind of romantic adventure.

"Bitter victory" (1957) directed by Nicholas Ray it seems like a forgotten movie after all these years going by loss of memory from the viewers, but is of course a thought concerning illusions of battle before and after like mirrors on sands. All that gave us another view from the war, with a much more human vulnerability and even the weakness of a true character in a shadowy intimacy, as only apparently unvanquished as confused minds in a moral addict to win something more than a medal after death, because if staying alive as another of one of the two characters in different grades of officer's hierarchy perhaps he also may have lost his wife. This movie concerns masculinity as fake target for a brainstorm about love and decay of feelings, with some alcoholic dreams to complete and complicating things and hierarchy, among officers during the Rommel debacle as fox of the desert on North Africa, during the trail across Libya. Director Nicholas Ray was underestimated somewhat in his cynical view and conception concerning value and results of the war or any war in the minds of human beings placed in a hierarchy of warrior's society. Maybe by his own conviction of peace means for reaching civil targets as contributing for the fight against hungry and thirst, imperfect feelings about love and reproduction of family, a new habitat out of eternal diaspora, love for the children and descendants. His sentimentality and deaf violence out of the shots were famous in meantime as misery of the humankind. This movie too inspired the fatigue of war expelled not exactly with a scale extremed by reverting heroism and cowardice only, but claiming right to the spirit of melancholic character, from a few officers with such a corporative intriguing mind in conditioned atmosphere, as the sickness of barracks as foolish underground off the reestablished hierarchy and the promotion waiting for being upper considered. Forgotten all the tricks of the battle was like a rear defection of moral, attending now the nostalgic landscape from their professional remembrances, which move them for the more competitive standing by : if one pick up the merit belonging to the other in exchange of a woman lost for the battle, it is a twist between sex and glory, because is also an affair for the little contravention in a conventional adultery case of such a cruelty, inspired on the random without antidote in short term from animal reign fatality in this part of the world. Apparently there is no rescue against the bite of a poisonous desert's scorpion, it seems from that last hand-tale written on the screenplay(by Vladimir Pozner ?), with an artificial compensation for the sentimentality of the city background, encircled by windy sands of think tanks prisoners of selfish intimacy and waiting for promotion in the career at any cost - the taste of Ray in 1957, the geophysical international year and also when the struggle approaches for independence nearby, seemingly was pretext for losing somewhat the élan of another fight - and foreseen nowhere friendship between people and camels.

Before entering the cinema theater I read a review of the film made by Godard in Cahiers du Cinéma. He defined this movie 'more than cinema' and a pure reflection of life. The miserable and coward behaviour of the character (played superbly by Curd Júrgens), a bewildered Richard Burton when futilely carries over his shoulder a dying soldier through the desert until he realizes his death: 'I kill the living and save the dead! or the moment when Ruth Roman looks for "Jimmy" among the survivors of the expedition, and many more... are all beautiful pieces of life, probably bigger than life... How easy is killing!? I also wanted to emphasize the brilliant expressionist photography used in the film. Especially in the nocturnal sequences.