Wonderfully offbeat film!

I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

The events surrounding a troop in North Africa dealing with a mission against Rommel are dramatized here with a return to what audiences had seen several years before with "The Desert Rats" and "The Desert Foxes". Richard Burton had been in one of those films and returned to familiar territory in this one, a World War II drama that unlike those two films is now pretty much forgotten. It's a story of a difficult mission, of human compassion and moral struggle, and a reminder that war in the silence of the unknown can be worse than a slow death. Burton leads this troop through various struggles, finding his own as he deals with the issue of life and death for suffering German prisoners. One man faces death by trying one attempt to bind the ties by showing Burton the picture of his German family, as if to say, "I'm human too." Burton, with that gorgeously eloquent voice, shows tenderness even as he kills, making the scene touching on many different levels.Burton has his back story explained as the one time lover of his commanding officer's wife, played by the sultry Ruth Roman. This creates a quiet animosity between Burton and c.o. Curd Jurhgens that heads to their mission overseas. Roman makes the most out of a small role, and Jergens adds layers of fear, desperation and turmoil of an often unsympathetic character. As directed by Nicholas Ray, this is so much more than a war mission film, with some surprising appearances in nice supporting roles by well known actors such as Christopher Lee and Nigel Green, showing the horrors and madness in war. A scene with a deadly scorpion (one of the tiny ones) will give you a start, so be warned.

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.

Ideally, a movie should make sense on its own terms. It is a bad movie when scenes can only be explained by external logic, by what was going on in the mind of the director or screenwriter. John Ford was once asked, regarding the movie "Stagecoach" (1939), why the Indians chasing the stagecoach didn't just shoot the horses, and his answer was, "Then there wouldn't have been any movie," which was an example of external logic. Actually, he was just being a smart aleck, because he could have said that the Indians wanted to capture the horses alive, which would have made sense, and more importantly, would have made the scene explicable in terms of internal logic alone.A big problem with "Bitter Victory" is that too much of what happens in the movie is explicable only in terms of external logic. Nicholas Ray, the director, had some idea in his head about how things should turn out, which leads to one forced scene after another. The first one occurs when Captain Leith sees Jane sitting at a table in a military night club. No sooner does he recognize her than Major Brand walks up beside him and asks Leith if he would like to meet his wife. What follows is a scene reminiscent of "Casablanca," in which it becomes clear that Leith and Jane were once lovers, and cryptic remarks pass back and forth between them while Brand takes it all in, not understanding the particulars of the remarks but gleaning their general significance nevertheless. Because we have seen this sort of thing before, we question it more than we might have when seeing it for the first time.In other words, the most natural thing for Leith to do when Brand asks him if he wants to meet his wife would be to say, "You mean Jane? I knew Jane before the war. I was just going over to say 'Hi.'" Now, of course they would not admit they had been lovers, but there is no reason for Leith and Jane to deny they even knew each other, especially since their innuendoes make their previous relationship so obvious. By concealing that they knew each other and then making the concealment obvious, they only made things worse. So, why did they do this? Internal logic fails us here, and we are forced to reach for external logic. Ray wanted Brand to find out that Leith and Jane were once secretly lovers so that he would become jealous, and so Ray concocted this hurried, unrealistic scene to that end.After the mission is complete, two men are too injured to walk. Brand tells Leith he will have to stay behind with the wounded men until they die and then catch up with the rest of the men. That makes no sense. If they are going to die anyway, just leave them behind. Furthermore, in a much later scene, Brand reveals his orders, written down on a piece of paper, that their mission is so important that if men are wounded, they are to be left behind. Now it really makes no sense.It gets worse. When Brand tells Leith to stay behind with the wounded, a soldier suggests making stretchers to carry them. Leith dismisses the idea, saying that the men would bleed to death in an hour. Sounds good to me. Carry the men in stretchers for an hour, and then when they die, leave them in the desert. Instead, Leith stays behind with the wounded, and then, after everyone is gone, kills them. Actually, he only kills one of them, because he runs out of bullets. So then he decides to carry the other wounded man all by himself. You see, carrying a wounded man on a stretcher is a bad idea, but tossing him over your shoulder and staggering through the desert is a good idea. Conveniently, the man dies, and Leith is able to catch up with the rest of the men.External logic to the rescue. The purpose of all this absurdity is to establish that Brand wanted Leith to kill the wounded for him, and then hold him responsible for doing so. That would be fine, if that could have been established coherently. But since internal logic fails us here, we have to reach for the director's motivations instead.Then there is the scene at the well. Before anyone takes a drink, someone suggests that the Germans may have poisoned it. To find out whether it is poisoned, Brand takes a swig. It tastes all right, but Leith says it is too soon to tell. So, they leave the well without drinking any of the water. But if they were not going to drink the water regardless of what happened when Brand swallowed some, what was the point of Brand's risking his life by drinking some of it in the first place? This contrivance can only be explained by Ray's desire to show how Brand can be intimidated by his fear that others may think him a coward.When Brand sees a scorpion crawling near Leith's leg during a rest period, he does not warn Leith, hoping that Leith will be bitten. Mokrane sees the scorpion too, but does nothing. After Leith is bitten, Mokrane tries to kill Brand for letting the scorpion bite Leith. But if Mokrane cares so much about Leith, why didn't he just walk over to the scorpion and step on it?Finally, before Leith dies, he asks Brand to tell Jane that she was right and he was wrong. Instead, Brand tells Jane he did not hear what Leith said, but he probably said that he loved her. We know Brand is the sort who would lie about such a thing, but why this particular lie? As with the scorpion scene, I don't think even external logic can make sense of this one.

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.