Originally published 15th February 2015 on my Tumblr. I'm moving some old writing from there over here because it's nice to have it all in one place. It's also nice to look back once in a while.
The cinema of Nicholas Ray is filled with characters navigating morally ambiguous worlds they don't seem to fit into: A teenager is overwhelmed by adult responsibility when a kid from his town is killed in Rebel Without A Cause; A businesswoman waiting for a new railroad to make her rich faces violent opposition from the bloodthirsty locals in Johnny Guitar. In Bitter Victory, a squad of soldiers have to decide whether they can live with the consequences of their actions when the rules of war are undefined. The answer, of course, is invariably no. After all, they're only human.
The film shows three stages of a top-secret military operation in North Africa during World War II: the planning, in which a general interviews two officers, Brand and Leith, for the opportunity to lead the operation; the operation itself, as the soldiers parachute behind enemy lines to steal crucial documents from the Nazis; and the aftermath, as the soldiers travel across the desert back to base. Leith is a soldier by circumstance. A volunteer to the war effort, he's an archaeologist with a deep understanding of both the surrounding terrain and its language; Brand, on the other hand, is a professional soldier with fifteen years service, more suited to leading men than Leith but less at ease in the desert. The two men are chosen for the mission, but Brand is put in charge. What follows is a straightforward (if treacherous) plan gone awry, first as a Nazi patrol intercepts the soldiers' transport, forcing them to walk miles back across the desert, then by Brand and Leith's increasingly fractious relationship, the fires of which are fuelled by past lovers, a potentially career-ending act of cowardice, and opposing personal codes of ethics.
Ray illustrates the moral differences between the two soldiers by placing them in situations in which they have to make a life or death decision: Leith is faced with the task of killing two mortally wounded men to ease their suffering, while Brand sees a scorpion inching towards an unaware Leith as he rests. Ray places each thought process under the same scrutiny, cutting between each man's perspective of the situation and their reaction to it as it unfolds. Brand watches the scorpion's approach and fails to act, knowing its sting could solve his problems by killing the only witness to his earlier act of cowardice, and Leith watches the men writhe in agony and decides to act, saving them from their pain by taking their lives.
But these decisions, no matter the intention, are ultimately both soldiers' downfall. Killing is "what makes a soldier but destroys you as a man," as Leith says, whether it's an act of mercy or a calculated act of malice. And men are destroyed. Before the mission, Brand and Leith are, at least outwardly, normal soldiers: Leith is cocky and sarcastic but eager to lead the operation, while Brand is more reserved and dutiful, but acts like a boy when he hears his wife has arrived. After the mission, however, their characters are vastly different, broken by the consequences of their decisions. They've both become murderers, and for what? The documents they fought so hard for seem to have no real significance, and the war is barely even acknowledged, with only the rare sound of planes overhead and the occasional Nazi patrol vehicle to suggest that it's even happening.
As the soldiers return from this trivial task in an almost incidental war, Ray frames them against the vast, endless vistas of the desert (shot in black and white CinemaScope, a complete turnaround following the vivid Technicolor of Hot Blood), their diminutive presence in the expanse of the sand dunes equal to that of their mission. These men kill for nothing and die for nothing. Bitter Victory isn't about what there is to gain from war, but what there is to lose.