I liked this one quite a bit. First of all Richard Burton was a great actor, and this is the best performance I've seen from him. You can feel his world weariness just dripping off him. Curd Jurgens is also really good in a very demanding role. Basically the whole movie is about their relationship, and they hate each other. There's no big resolution where they suddenly respect each other like you would get in a formula movie. A lot of the point is that Jurgens' character isn't respectable, and the main revelation is that he comes to feel the same way. But he's not villainous, it's easy to empathize with him even though he is sort of a cretin.
The cinematography is really extraordinary, especially the scenes in the desert. It reminds me of Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" from a few years later. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an influence. The relationship is also slightly similar to the one between O'Toole and Shariff's characters in that film.
The movie is deceptively course and 2 dimensional, like the combat dummies who are the first and last images we see in the film. Stick figures, pretending to be men, setting themselves up as targets. It doesn't ask us to feel sorry for the characters or to admire them, they aren't "larger than life" the way most characters are in war movies. I felt like the movie was saying that war is a natural state of mankind, not some kind of romantic adventure.
The cinematography is really extraordinary, especially the scenes in the desert. It reminds me of Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" from a few years later. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an influence. The relationship is also slightly similar to the one between O'Toole and Shariff's characters in that film.
The movie is deceptively course and 2 dimensional, like the combat dummies who are the first and last images we see in the film. Stick figures, pretending to be men, setting themselves up as targets. It doesn't ask us to feel sorry for the characters or to admire them, they aren't "larger than life" the way most characters are in war movies. I felt like the movie was saying that war is a natural state of mankind, not some kind of romantic adventure.