“I killed the living, and I saved the dead.”

-Captain Leith (Bitter Victory)

There’s something immediately poignant in the scene in which Captain Leith (Richard Burton) watches his fallen comrades bleed to death in the Libyan desert after an assault on a German patrol unit. Until then, Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory, while brilliantly edited and directed, played out with only a touch of melodrama; not enough to muck up the screenplay, but enough to inextricably shackle it to a conventional Hollywood war movie. However, at the moment when the brutal reality of its screenplay emerges, the film rises above its expectations becoming something that transcends cinematic standards to become a film of painful honesty.

His better-known films like Rebel Without a Cause perhaps overshadow Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory, which Jean-Luc Godard, himself a fervent admirer of Ray’s work, proclaimed the best film of 1957. But measure anything Ray has accomplished to that one scene in the desert where Leith must decide whether to execute a dying soldier and you’ll agree that this is Ray’s masterpiece. Curd Jürgens likewise turns in an equally powerful performance as the conflicted leader of the secret mission to infiltrate a German base in Libya who lets his personal life stand in the way of his duty. It’s a grand tale of cowardice and honor, told with poignant subtlety. Those who haven’t seen it may want to seek this one out and those who have may want to consider a second look.