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.

A heavy-handed thing to say, but that's what Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed upon seeing this film at the Cannes Film Festival. The French knew it long before we did: Nicholas Ray was one of the most original and wisest directors to ever make films. He took a French anti-war book and he made it into a film that was so much more than that. Unlike his previous routine assignment to confirm his allegiance to Howard Hughes during the Red Scare FLYING LEATHERNECKS, there are more layers that stretch far beyond the sea of sand that cast Richard Burton and Curt Jurgens away from society. Unlike most war films of its time and like almost every film Ray ever made, the conflict lies not in the battles between the nations, but inside the hearts of the film's protagonists. The brooding Richard Burton is given a great role as disillusioned soldier Captain James Leith, forced to carry out an assignment with Major Brand, a man he dislikes (the feeling is mutual--Leith had an affair with Brand's wife Jane a few years back, and the desire still lingers on, showing Leith's last trace of humanity). Their assignment is to travel behind enemy lines and take some German documents. The long journey through the desert becomes even more heated as Leith reminds Brand of his cowardice (Brand hesitated to kill a German soldier during an attack) and Brand tries in subtle ways to kill Leith to cover up his cowardice. But this isn't a black and white good-guy/bad-guy caricature; there are so many shades of gray in both characters. As Leith later says, the two are almost mirror images (although he is much wiser than Brand and accepts his futility, Leith is not as strong as some might make him to be; he admits to leaving Jane because he was scared to get close to someone else--like all of Ray's anti-heroes, the ones who reject love are the ones who need it the most), possibly explaining why Brand feels compelled to kill Leith. BITTER VICTORY wasn't the first anti-war film, but it was one of the few to make its statement so eloquently (and it had the most profound title). Too subtle to connect with American audiences (the film flopped badly at the box-office and when the studio re-cut it several times, each time farther and farther away from Nicholas Ray's original vision, it didn't work) but revered by French audiences, BITTER VICTORY has grown more potent in the decades since its release. The futility of war isn't proclaimed by the horrible violence of battle like countless films, but through the impossible absurdity of a man's role in the war. After all, if Leith "kills the living and saves the dead," what difference does it make, other than that little matter of when and what for? By the end, how is Brand any different from the training dummies with hearts painted over them? The enlightenment that Brand finds by the film's end comes too late; he's already lost what's precious to him and all he has to show for it is a DSO. It truly is a bitter victory.

"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.