HotToastyRag
For 1957, Bitter Victory is a pretty graphic war movie. It's filmed in black and white, but bloodstains and bullet holes are shown, deaths are prolonged, and the suspense of war is captured well.Curd Jurgens plays an officer in charge of a mission to German-controlled Benghazi during WWII. His second-in-command is Richard Burton, and since Burton is in love with Jurgens's wife, they don't have a very good working relationship. As interesting as this dynamic is, on and off the battlefield, the war scenes are where this movie really shines.This is not your typical WWII movie where one randomly fired gun makes the bad guy fall over, and the good guy comes home with a tiny scratch on his forehead as a battle scar. These men are out in the desert, delirious from heat and dying from dehydration, unfamiliar with the terrain, fighting men, scorpions, and the sun, and forced to face worse situations than they thought possible. I won't spoil anything, but there's a very intense scene in which one soldier is dying and another soldier has to decide whether to shoot him and put him out of his misery or let him die a slow, painful death. Those scenes weren't generally filmed in 1957! If you're used to lots of blood and torture in your war movies, you won't find this movie very exciting. But for a tasteful, classic war movie, it's very good. It's one of the best war movies I've seen. Plus, Richard Burton looks so incredibly handsome in his uniform. Ladies, you'll definitely want to check this one out.
MartinHafer
This film made a very odd casting decision. For some reason, the German actor Curt Jurgens was hired to play one of the leads...a British major serving in WWII! He doesn't sound the least bit British and this took me out of the film a bit. The other lead was Richard Burton....a man who grows to hate and have contempt for the major during the course of their suicide mission. This is because although the Major was in control of the mission, he is a coward and hesitates when they need to act. And, it appears that the Major might just be trying to get the Captain (Burton) killed off so that no one will know about his failings as a leader.An interesting portrait of humans in war, it's worth seeing but isn't a great war film. By the way, there was one scene that annoyed me. The Captain is bitten by a scorpion and INSTANTLY everyone thinks he will die. Death from scorpion stings is VERY rare and only about 2% of all scorpion species MIGHT be able to kill you...and mostly if your system is already compromised. And, just like snakebites, you DO NOT cut the wound to suck out the poison!!! Kids...don't try this at home!!!
Leofwine_draca
BITTER VICTORY is a standard WW2 flick that seems to have heavily inspired the Italian run of WW2 movies that came out some ten years later. The bulk of the film is a men-on-a-mission thriller as a group of British soldiers steal some top secret documents from the Nazis and then are forced to flee for their lives into the desert. What follows will surprise nobody watching, as this is very straightforward stuff.What BITTER VICTORY does have going for it is a good cast, headlined by Curd Jurgens (surprisingly playing a Brit) and Richard Burton. The two have a love triangle going on involving Jurgens's wife, so there's a lot of antagonism and even hints at forthcoming murder that helps to drive the movie's conflict. The supporting cast is rounded out by the likes of Nigel Green, Christopher Lee, and Alfred Burke.This film is rather light on action, although the scenes set in Benghazi involving Green's safecracker are well handled. Overall the movie is well shot by American director Nicholas Ray (ON DANGEROUS GROUND), but it lacks quite a bit of suspense considering the premise so it's only middling stuff.
dbdumonteil
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.
AD
