You glance at the credits to “Bitter Victory,” a World War II in the Libyan desert thriller starring Richard Burton, Curd Jürgens, Ruth Roman, Nigel Green and Christopher Lee, the only true “war” movie of director and co-writer Nicholas Ray, and you wonder, “Wait, how’d I miss this?”

The answer turns out to be, “Just lucky, I guess.”

Ray owes his screen immortality to “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) and much of his reputation as an auteur to the films that led up to it — “They Live By Night,” “Johnny Guitar” and “In a Lonely Place.” But everything changed for him after “Rebel,” and he found himself working on a larger canvas, for higher stakes for much of the rest of his career.

The telling title on his post-James Dean resume is the other “war movie” he was on board to direct, the bloated 1960s epic “55 Days in Peking,” which he quit days into production, and finished off with a heart attack a short time afterwards. He handled the epic scale of “King of Kings” as well as could be expected. But “combat” and wasn’t his thing, unless it was limited to a simple gunfight or knife fight.

“Bitter Victory” is a groaning psychological thriller wrapped in a desert commando mission package. It opens with a string of tedious, unhurried, cinematically and militarily slack “assigned a mission” scenes confined to soundtstages meant to pass for Cairo and improves only somewhat when it moves out of doors for its trek through the Libyan Desert.

Ray handles firefights with so little care that they had to be replayed in fast-motion. He fretted not at all at how “tiny smoke bomb” every grenade explosion looked and was so careless with little matters like big explosions used as “a distraction” not distracting the hapless German guards from marching their rounds at their Benghazi headquarters, the object of this commando raid.

But stabbings and summary executions the filmmaker tackled with a bit more relish.

Curd Jürgens is cast against type as British Major Brand, a desk officer assigned a mission to retrieve “documents” from Gen. Erwin Rommel’s HQ. It’s the low ebb of the North African campaign, with the Brits who aren’t retreating on the front lines (too) comfortably cosseted in Cairo.

The reality was a bit more panicked, history told us.

Ray directs us through an enthusiastic training gym where soldiers are going at it with stylized dummies, tackling, stabbing and choking them with gusto.

Major Brand has no combat experience, doesn’t speak Arabic or German and isn’t someone who’s ever commanded men in the field. Not to worry, his second, Captain Leith (Burton) is similarly inexperienced. He’s a pre-war archaeologist who speaks Arabic, a “volunteer,” but also “an…intellectual.” And “Welsh,” the commanding officer (Anthony Bushell) huffs.

That’ll work out, we’re sure.

Why, let’s have Leith meet Brand’s wife (Ruth Roman). Turns out Leith and Jane have history, which enflames Brand a bit.

And thus the real reason Ray took this job comes to light. This will be a to-the-death slap-fight through the desert, with Leith questioning Brand’s bravery aka “manhood” and Brand failing tests of that, but cunningly pondering ways to get rid of Leith.

This French co-production betrays a certain sloppiness, pretty much start to finish. “Bitter Victory” predates the golden age of “military advisors,” and bears little resemblence to the better combat films of the era.

Ray dispensed with sequences like the parachute behind the lines business but never spared a moment of bare-teeth snarling between the subordinate officer (Burton) and his inferior superior.

The supporting cast was pretty unhappy, as casting, according to Christopher Lee (one of the sergeants in the 30 man commando unit), who said the men all drew lots as to who would play what.

Thus variety show ham Harry Landis got a few closeups, acting out a combat mission with his fingers on a table, accompanied by vocal sound effects, and Nigel Green, at his best in “Zulu” a few years later, stands out as the unit sadist. Nobody else got a chance to make his mark.

Burton gets all the good lines — “You have the Christian decency that forbids killing a dying man but ignores the work of a sharpshooter…You’re afraid to go in and kill with your bare hands. That’s what makes a soldier and destroys you as a man…The fine line between war and murder is distance.”

That makes the war of wills that supposedly drives the picture lopsided. Jürgens has a shifty-eyed close-up or two, Burton explodes or suffers mightily and “Bitter Victory” staggers onward ever onward in faint hope of a draw but always destined to fall well short.

Rating: “approved,” violence, innuendo

Cast: Richard Taylor, Curd Jürgens, Ruth Roman, Nigel Green, Christopher Lee, Harry Landis, Anthony Bushell and Raymond Pellegrin.

Credits: Directed by Nicholas Ray, scripted by René Hardy, Gavin Lambert and Nicholas Ray. A Columbia release on Amazon, Tubi, etc.

Running time: 1:41 (1:22 in the first U.S. version)