“After World War II it was the first combined antihero, antiwar film...They did their best to bury it,” Ray said of this production. Ray in effect creates a chamber piece for two enemies, British officers in the Libyan desert in 1942 leading a commando raid to steal secret papers from Rommel's headquarters, all the while locked in bitter personal conflict over a wife waiting at home for the wrong man. Richard Burton is compelling as Captain Leith, a seeming idealist who may in fact have volunteered out of a “desire to deal with a thankless universe in its purest form” (Michael Goodwin, Naomi Wise). In the other corner is Curd Jürgens's Major Brand, whose acts of cowardice reflect both a disquieting personality trait and a calculated revenge born of jealousy. Ray constructed a war drama of bitter paradoxes-the raid succeeds but fails, and the coward is branded a hero-one that was also a breakthrough in the realist aesthetic. Jean-Luc Godard wrote, “Bitter Victory is not a reflection of life, it is life turned into a film...at once the most direct and the most secret of films, the most subtle and the crudest.”
—Judy Bloch