Bitter Victory

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Product Description ------------------- A World War II drama starring Richard Burton (Academy Award(r) nomination for Best Actor, Equus, 1977and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, 1966) and Curt Jurgens (The Who Loved Me) as Captain Leith and Major Brand, a pair of British Army officers assigned to execute a daring commando raid on the Libyan stronghold of General Rommel. Before the mission even begins, the tension between the two is evident, a situation that is only exacerbated when Brand learns that Leith was once romantically involved with his wife, Jane (Ruth Roman, TV's Knott's Landing ). Once the operation is underway, Brand's cowardice forced Leith to step in and kill a German soldier. This act only adds to Brand's hatred for his second-in-command and as it grows, a series of disasters threaten the men and the successof their mission. Who will live, who will die, and what price honor? .com ---- Jean-Luc Godard once famously wrote, "The cinema is Nicholas Ray." Much less famous is the movie that occasioned the observation. Bitter Victory marked Ray's ascension to "auteur" demigod status in France. Unfortunately, American prints ran 20 minutes shorter than the Amère victoire seen in Europe, with the unsurprising result that this enigmatic film--so charged with suppressed desperation and rage, you can hear the neurons snapping--became well-nigh incoherent. It gets worse. The picture, a milestone in the deployment of Cinema for emotional subtlety and expressiveness, was dumped to television in a pan-&-scan version that made hash of its compositions and editing rhythm. And that's the only way it was seen, for decades. The setting is North Africa early in World War II. Two British officers, played by Curd Jürgens and Richard Burton, lead a commando team into the desert to attack a German post. Commander Jürgens doesn't know, but comes to suspect, that his wife (Ruth Roman) and Burton were involved sometime before Jürgens married her. The mission recedes into the background as the tension between the two men builds, and issues of ethics, cowardice, and the legitimacy of wartime killing are thrown into against the anvil of the desert. Jurgens was an opaque actor, but Burton etches a searingly modern portrait of an alienated soul whose mordant self-awareness avails him nothing; it's right up there with such Ray-directed landmark performances as James Dean's in Rebel Without a Cause and Humphrey Bogart's in In a Lonely Place. --Richard T. Jameson