Bitter Victory (1957)

Bitter Victory: Nicholas Ray’s fuming 1957 feature is probably best known for a certain nouvelle vague legend’s high praise, but the conversation shouldn’t start and end there.  The advertised catalyst for most of the internal conflict is a messy and contrived love triangle but the real root to me is tricky dichotomy and careerist covetousness and insatiability. The fact that Captain James Leith (Richard Burton), an archeologist with knowledge of the land but little military know-how, had a previous undisclosed affair with his superior’s wife (Ruth Roman) is really just the cherry on top. Right off the bat General David Brand (Curt Jurgens) is portrayed as an infantile sophisticate in constant route to the top, having spent most of his time killing at a cool distance with a pen or telegraph. Leith is his antithesis, a man with a healthy disillusionment about himself, the nature of war, and the façade of rank and decoration. Both men are sent to retrieved documents from Rommel’s headquarters in Benghazi, a successful mission followed by the long and treacherous return home through the desert. Within the vast spiritual confines of their prison arises the troubling and revealing nature of Brand’s professional spinelessness as well as Leith’s own detached antipathy towards his rival’s manliness and code of blind duty. Talk about a personal war film. Bitter Victory was written by the author Rene Hardy, Ray, and his significant other at the time, Gavin Lambert who formerly served as editor of Sight and Sound. The shoot was reportedly messy with rewrites, compromised castings and even a supposed lottery that left most of the actors playing characters they didn’t want to play, studio-head interferences, excessive gambling, carousing, and drinking by Ray, etc. Studio manipulation and tampering could be attributed to Leith’s hatred for Brand. He not only despises his superior because of his marriage to the woman he thinks he loves but also because Leith has made a distinction between murder and killing, specifically the physical distance that protects him from his own conscience. But what does this consciousness offer him? The catalyst for this hatred comes during the raid on Rommel’s command center where Brand gets cold feet right off the bat, leaving Leith to kill a guard in a very close and nasty fashion. But though it’s tempting to reduce Brand to sheepish villain and exalt Leith to courageous hero, there are certainly moments to suggest a complexity to the situation and Ray’s view of humanity by extension. Brand (and Leith’s Libyan friend and guide, in a surprising twist) watches as a scorpion seals Leith’s fate, while Leith saves Brand during a sandstorm, but Brand also drinks from a potentially poisoned well water after being goaded by Leith, while Leith killed a defenseless fatally wounded German soldier who has just shown him pictures of his wife and kids out of a mixture of humanitarian, self preserving, and impatient desperation. It’s hard not to wonder if the two men are all that different in nature, if their values actually come from such a different place and how much the senselessness of war plays a part in this blurring of primordial lines. What’s clear in the end is that some men get awards for these macho games while others are buried in the desert. Brand becomes a straw man adorned with medals, alone amongst his fellow dummies with his wife weeping instead on the shoulder of a hollow man. Sadly, the film’s failure  landed Ray in the hospital and some speculate if it might not have harmfully affected his trajectory.