This film (being shown from a 35mm print), in the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank, is also being shown on May 12th and 29th, with the last date including an introduction by Geoff Andrew, BFI programmer-at-large, whose book, 'The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall' is highly recommended and can be found via this link.
“There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.” Jean-Luc Godard*
Time Out review:
The title tells all. Though Curt Jürgens and Richard Burton lead a successful World War II assault on Rommel's desert headquarters (for which Jürgens is undeservedly decorated), in the course of the raid both men are broken. Jürgens falls prey to indecision and cowardice brought on by his envy of the seeming ease with which Burton handles both the military situation and his personal affairs (including a past liaison with Jürgens' wife), while Burton's romantic veneer is shattered by the conflicting emotions he discovers within himself. The resulting personal anguish, summed up in Burton's blank delivery of the line 'I kill the living and save the dead', seeps into the very grain of Nicholas Ray's magisterial black-and-white 'Scope set-ups.
Phil Hoad
Here (and above) is an extract.
*Opening sentence of Godard's contemporaneous review of Bitter Victory
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