How sad is this?

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

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.

It's dark days in North Africa during WWII. Captain Jim Leith (Richard Burton) and Major David Brand (Curt Jürgens) arrive in Egypt to interview for a special mission. Leith is a former archaeologist with experience in Libya and fluent in Arabic. Brand is a stuffy untested officer with 13 years in the army but little experience in the foreign land. Brand's wife Jane turns out to be Leith's former lover. Both men are assigned the mission with Brand as the commander. The small expendable thirty men group goes behind the lines to steal plans from German headquarters in Benghazi.It's highly convenient about Jane. If a story does that, it needs an iconic line like "of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world". The movie needs better writing. The action is not that big. There is a lot of desert. It's a lot of sand. The mission is questionable and their escape is badly planned. Despite any shortcomings, the movie does have Burton and it's a functional war adventure/character struggle.

A "Lawrence of Arabia," this film isn't. In fact, it's far from that all though we have plenty of desert sand along the way.The film will absolutely overwhelm you with its boredom,despite the starring of Richard Burton and Kurt Jurgens.We have absolutely no idea until the very end why the men went on such a mission. The actual obtaining of the material was done with little excitement.The whole thing boils down to getting away in the desert and whether to kill the wounded on either side.This is rather a tedious film, co-starring Ruth Roman, married to Corporal Jurgens, but once involved with Burton. It doesn't take Jurgens long to realize what has transpired between the two.Ironically, what Burton did during the desert scenes, he avoids that happening to him via the sandstorm. "He killed the living, and saved the dead." That's a major line uttered by Burton in this film. This film could easily kill the viewers watching it.

Possibly Nicholas Ray's most masculine film, he begins with a great opening credits sequence and follows with a studious, procedural atmosphere. When it gets emotionally dramatic quite soon, it remains taut, spare, subdued. Because Ray doesn't tell us how to feel about it, our understanding of the histrionics is that much clearer and unclouded. By the twenty-minute mark, the tension is a natural agreement between us and the film, which sits back viewing objectively horizontal planes, or stationary horizontal shots of whatever natural blocking. Even a shootout in the desert night.Bitter Victory is a rare treat, a military thriller involving war and covert ops, but focusing not on combat or conspiracies, but on the agitated envy two Allied officers who are situated on a commando raid together. We skip the parachuting in to Bengasi but we're quickly witness to their wordless close calls and perceptions of un-subtitled Arabic. This downbeat emotional drama is what no Jack Ryan or Jason Bourne film would have the nerve or insight to do. It sees combat violence, sneak operations and life-or-death situations, of course, but it does not see the core of the suspense in it. But one of the two central characters, yes, essentially just two, is burying his knowledge that he's unfit for his job and undeserving of his command as deep as he can beneath the assurances of his aggressive justification. Another is having an affair with that very commander's wife, whose emotions are displaced from her husband.The on-screen violence is far from realistic, but building towards it and simmering down from it are steady and natural to the point that I might even say that it is Ray's most effective film about repression and male anger, even the great In a Lonely Place, in which Humphrey Bogart's outbursts betray an all-too-real recklessness in his eyes. The tension in Bitter Victory makes brief outbursts by, say, the latter said central character, played intensely by Richard Burton, feel twice the jolt of the violence which is expected of his mission. And the tensions heightened by the controlling anger of the commander, in a strong performance by Curt Jurgens, create a balance of ambiguity. We know the crushing inadequacies that haunt the very men we find so brutally cold.