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Truly Dreadful Film

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"Bitter Victory" refers to the medal presented to Major David Brand (Curt Jurgens) at the end of a commando mission in North Africa during WWII.General Patterson (Anthony Bushell) and Lt. Colonel Callandar (Alfred Burke) assemble a group of commandos for a raid on Rommel's HQ in Bengazi, . The group is to obtain some valuable documents that will undermine Rommell's efforts in North Africa.Major David Brand (Jurgens) heads up the group with Captain James Leith (Richard Burton) second in command. Included in the group are Lt. Barton (Sean Kelly), Sgt. Barney (Christopher Lee) and Psychotic Pvt. Wilkins (Nigel Green) among others. Barton's wife Jane (Ruth Roman) arrives and as it turns out she and Leith had an affair prior to the war. Brand becomes very jealous.The group embarks upon their mission. Brand freezes up in battle and loses the respect of his men. The group accomplishes their mission and begin the long trek back to their HQ. Brand increasingly has it out for Leith. First he leaves him and his Arab friend Mekrane (Ray Pellegrin) behind to "tend to the German wounded" following a battle with a German patrol hoping that Leith would somehow perish trying to catch up with the main group.After being startled by a scorpion and unbeknownst to the others, Brand watches as the scorpion crawls up Leith's pant leg and stings him. Mekrane tries frantically to save his friend but is unable to do so. Mekrane, knowing that Brand is somehow responsible, tries to kill him but is over powered by Brand who shoots him down.As the group prepares to leave with Leith being left behind to die, a sand storm erupts temporarily trapping the group. Leith flings himself over BRand to protect him and dies during the storm. The storm subsides and Brand leads the group back to the HQ in Cairo to great acclaim. But Brand and his men know what really happened. So when General Patterson bestows upon Brand a Distinguished service medal..............................................In another British tour de force between two great actors, Director Nicholas Ray gives us A great confrontation between two officers in love with the same woman. One is insanely jealous of the other, while the other is ready to step away knowing the husband will likely try to kill him at some point during the mission. The tension between the two is mesmerizing.Christopher Lee was just to embark on his Hammer Horror films and cinematic immortality. Similarly, Nigel Green was just coming into his own as a major character actor.In the end credits, watch for the spelling of Jurgens first name as C-U-R-D.

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.

Two errors in the cast:French actor Raymond Pellegrin is not credible as an Arab scout ,at least to French eyes;Ruth Roman is too cold to portray a Ray heroine successfully ;Hitchcock ,in Truffaut/Hitchcock ,said the same about her in "strangers on a train" .But it does not matter because it's a man's movie .It is curious to have cast Jurgens as an South African officer but his playing opposite a young Burton is quite efficient.The cast and credits had warned us : the enemy you fight is not the one you think of .The last scene clinches it ,when the medal amounts to nothing.This is not Ray's best film ,but it is probably his most violent one : Burton saving the dead and killing the living is impressive ;Jurgens eaten with jealousy and hatred watching the scorpion..Compare the death of Burton with that of Burl Ives in "winds across the everglades" ,the follow-up to "bitter victory" .The strange ancient city in the middle of the desert is an exact equivalent of the planetarium in "rebel without a cause" : those walls still standing and those stars in the sky will survive our little wars ,our glorious (or bitter) victories or our growing up angst.

"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.