Old Movie Review: "Five Graves to Cairo"

In my quest to see as many Billy Wilder movies as I can, yesterday I watched "Five Graves to Cairo" (1943).  The movie starred Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, and Erich von Stroheim.  Wilder wrote the screenplay with his frequent writing partner Charles Brackett, and it was only the second movie that he directed.

This is a World War II movie, but it takes place in a small space - a small hotel in an Egyptian desert oasis.  Tone is a shell-shocked British soldier who stumbles upon the place just before  the German tank troops, including Field Marshall Erwin Rommel himself, arrive to rest up before rolling on to conquer Cairo in the North African campaign.  Tone then goes "undercover" with the help of chambermaid Baxter in an effort to thwart the Nazis.  Of course, history tells us that that is indeed what happened, and this tense little drama offers an interesting speculation as to exactly how the Allies performed that task.  Fiction it may be, but fun and exciting fiction to be sure.

History and the movies have cast Rommel as a sort of "noble soldier", a brilliant military tactician, who just so happened to be doing his duty in service of the Wrong Side.  Not so in this movie.  Oh, Rommel is still the brilliant tactician, but noble...not so much.  As played by von Stroheim, he is an evil Nazi through-and-through, and he, von Stroheim, steals the movie.

As I mentioned, this was the second movie that Wilder directed.  A year after "Five Graves to Cairo", Wilder broke out big time with the terrific "Double Indemnity", and the roster of terrific Wilder hits continued to grow and grow from there.  Seven years later in 1950, Wilder and Brackett wrote and Wilder directed the classic "Sunset Boulevard".  In that movie, Wilder once again cast Erich von Stroheim as Max, the faithful butler to Norma Desmond.  In fact, von Stroheim was one of the great directors of the silent movie era, but is in the roll of Max von Meyerling that he is most remembered.

In the great body of work that Wilder produced, a movie like "Five Graves to Cairo" is easily overlooked, which is too bad.  It is one that movie lovers should make a point of seeing.  Be assured that it will be on my "DVR Alert" list when next it turns up on Turner Classic Movies.