Directed by:
Nicholas RayCinematography:
Michel KelberComposer:
Maurice LerouxCast:
Richard Burton, Curd Jürgens, Ruth Roman, Raymond Pellegrin, Anthony Bushell, Nigel Green, Christopher Lee, Raoul Delfosse, Andrew Crawford, Alfred Burke (more)VOD (1)
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Set during WWII and unfolding mostly in the deserts of Libya, the film establishes a rivalry between its two main characters from the very beginning. The charismatic Captain James Leith (Richard Burton) and his cowardly superior, Major David Brand (Curt Jurgens), both accept a dangerous assignment to be sent to Libya to recover top-secret documents. Before they depart, Brand sees his wife Jane (Ruth Roman) dancing with the Captain, and becomes enflamed with jealousy; it turns out that Leith and Jane were lovers before the war. The rest of the exposition traces the two men's journey, made even more perilous by their intense enmity, and moves toward a climactic ending that plays up the absurdity of war. Refusing to draw a clear division between hero and villain, Ray highlights the way war ultimately reduces everyone to the same petty motivations and empty rhetoric. (official distributor synopsis)
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This post is primarily written as a reminder that it was in the comment to this film by Nicholas Ray where Godard wrote the famous and still endlessly quoted sentence in Cahiers du cinéma in January 1958: "We have already seen theater (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), and music (Renoir). However, there is also film, and Nicholas Ray is film." In addition, for example: "... because Bitter Victory is not a reflection of life, but life itself created through the medium of film... (...) It's not a film, it's something better than a film." (sic!) Well, even a master carpenter cuts himself sometimes, and in this case, in my opinion, the author of these sentences must have cut off his entire hand, because what I saw were hardly believable performances (on which the film stands) in the midst of a screenplay that was not at all convincing. The film is saved by the desert locations, which give some scenes impact when the filmmakers themselves failed to do so before.
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