Bitter Victory (1957)

User Rating:

7.2/10   

Director:

Nicholas Ray

Writers:

Paul Gallico (additional dialogue)
René Hardy (novel)

Release Date:

March 1958 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Drama | History | War

Tagline:

The Desert Commando Raid They Wiped Off the Record Books!

Plot:

A commander receives a citation for an attack on Rommel's headquarters, which is actually undeserved as the commander is unfit for his job. On top of that, unbeknownst to him, his wife is having an affair with one of his officers.

Plot Keywords:

Sergeant | Historical | Based On Novel

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Richard Burton	...	Capt. Leith
Curd Jürgens	...	Maj. Brand (as Curt Jurgens)
Ruth Roman	...	Jane Brand
Raymond Pellegrin	...	Mekrane
Anthony Bushell	...	Gen. Patterson
Alfred Burke	...	Lt. Col. Callander
Sean Kelly	...	Lt. Barton
Ramón de Larrocha	...	Lt. Sanders (as Ramon de Larrocha)
Christopher Lee	...	Sgt. Barney
Ronan O'Casey	...	Sgt. Dunnigan
Fred Matter	...	Col. Lutze
Raoul Delfosse	...	Lt. Kassel
Andrew Crawford	...	Roberts
Nigel Green	...	Pvt. Wilkins
Harry Landis	...	Browning

Also Known As:

Amère victoire (France)
Bitter Victory (USA)

Runtime:

102 min | USA:82 min

Country:

France | USA

Language:

English | German

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric)

Certification:

West Germany:16 (f) | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15 | UK:A | USA:Approved (certificate number not listed)

Filming Locations:

France

Company:

Columbia Pictures Corporation

Trivia:

Upon seeing this at the Venice Film Festival, Jean-Luc Godard said his iconic statement "Le cinema, c'est Nicholas Ray (The cinema is Nicholas Ray)."

Quotes:

Capt. Leith: You're afraid to go in and kill with your bare hands. That's what makes a soldier and destroys you as a man.

Mirrors on sands by night

"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.