Five Graves to Cairo (Paramount, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

By the time Mauvaise Graine was released, Billy Wilder was already in Hollywood; he’d sold a story called Pam-Pam to Columbia Pictures and they’d given him a six-month contract. The director who’d recommended him was a fellow German expat, Joe May, who directed Wilder’s first U.S. film, Music in the Air. It was an adaptation of a Jerome Kern musical starring Gloria Swanson and John Boles, and Wilder co-wrote the script with Harold Young. Then Wilder got a screenwriting contract at Paramount and the studio teamed him with Charles Brackett. At first they were just writers, but Wilder got tired of directors (especially Mitchell Leisen) rewriting his scripts behind his back, so he went to the bosses at Paramount and demanded the chance to direct a film himself. The film was The Major and the Minor, starring Ginger Rogers as a young woman who tries to return home after bombing out on Broadway by posing as a child because she doesn’t have the return train fare for an adult ticket. Wilder’s next film as a director was the one we watched last night: Five Graves to Cairo, a timely World War II melodrama based on an old play by Lajos Biró that Paramount had already filmed twice before (as a successful silent in 1927 and a flop talkie in 1939). They tweaked the story into a tale of a British servicemember named Corporal John Bramble (Franchot Tone, top-billed) whom we see alone in a tank moving through the desert surrounding Egypt (likely filmed in Yuma, Arizona, Hollywood’s all-purpose location for the Sahara). He’s delirious and it dawns on him that he’s all alone in the tank; the other four crew members are all dead.

He arrives in a middle-of-nowhere location where there’s a hotel called the “Empress of Britain” (it’s supposed to be a reference to Queen Victoria, whose portrait is on the wall, but Charles red-flagged it as a goof because Victoria never held the title “Empress of Britain,” though she was “Empress of India” during the Raj), and in his delirious state he’s convinced that the hotel is actually British regimental headquarters and the hotel’s proprietor, Farid (Akim Tamiroff at his most overbearing; I guess Wilder wasn’t an experienced enough director to get him to stop overacting), is his commanding officer. He hides out and meets the hotel’s maid, Marie-Jacques Claire, known as “Mouche” (Anne Baxter), a refugee from France who hates the British for having allegedly abandoned her country to the Nazis. The hotel receives a visitor named Lieutenant Schwegler (a marvelously overwrought performance from Peter Van Eyck) who tells Farid and Mouche that the German General Staff is taking over the hotel and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Erich von Stroheim) will be staying there personally while he carries out his final and long-planned conquest of British-aligned Egypt. Bramble comes to and disguises himself as the hotel’s dead waiter, Paul Davos. Davos had a club foot and Bramble has to wear Davos’s compensating boot. Davos, unbeknownst to Bramble, was also a German spy, and the Germans plan to send him on ahead to Cairo to be ready for them when Rommel invades Cairo and takes it over.

The film’s MacGuffin is the five secret dumps of ammunition and supplies Rommel secreted in the Egyptian desert in 1937, posing as a German archaeologist, and when Rommel’s men capture the top British officers in Egypt (including familiar character “names” like Miles Mander and Ian Keith) he explains the whole plan to them except for concealing the most important piece of information: where the dumps are. Ultimately Bramble deduces that the dumps are under the five letters spelling out “Egypt” on Rommel’s map of the country; he selected locations near where “E,” “G,” “Y,” “P” and “T” appear on the map, and the “P” is under El Alamein. American moviegoers in 1943 would have identified El Alamein as the key location of the battle that turned the tide for the Allies in the North Africa campaign, and along with the Russian victory over the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for the Axis side in the overall war. Apparently moviegoers were supposed to believe that Franchot Tone’s detective skills were what had made the El Alamein victory possible. Wilder had been in awe of Erich von Stroheim’s skills as a director, and in his Higham-Greenberg interview he recalled telling Stroheim that he’d been 10 years ahead of his time as a director, “No, 20,” Stroheim replied.

In Five Graves to Cairo Stroheim insisted on wearing a dark face makeup as Rommel but leaving a tan line where his hat would have fallen, reasoning that Rommel would have been out in the sun so long as a desert commander but the top of his head would not have been exposed. He also insisted that, like the real Rommel, he would wear two cameras around his neck; they had to be German Leica cameras (good luck getting those with the U.S. and Germany at war with each other!) and they had to have film inside. Stroheim told Wilder, “The audience will sense if the films aren’t inside; they’ll feel that they are merely props.” It was the same infamous attitude that had cost Stroheim his career as a director, though a lot of the legends were exaggerated at the time and have become even more so in the retelling. In 1923, making a film at Universal called The Merry-Go-Round, Stroheim had a scene in which actor Norman Kerry, playing the male lead, wakes up wearing a monogrammed nightgown. Both the nightgown and its monogram are clearly visible on screen. Only the Hollywood rumor mill changed one leading actor into hundreds of extras, and one visibly monogrammed nightgown into hundreds of monogrammed underpants, all invisible to the camera. Five Graves to Cairo is a nicely done World War II melodrama, refreshingly free of the Allied pro-democracy propaganda that marred a lot of films made during the war (at least until the final reel) and blessed with Stroheim’s finely honed performance, albeit as the stereotyped “Hun” villain he’d been playing during both world wars that had earned him the nickname “The Man You Love to Hate.” Wilder’s admiration for Stroheim shines through not only here but in their far more famous subsequent film together, Sunset Boulevard – even though Stroheim dismissed his Sunset Boulevard role as “that lousy butler part” – in which it was Stroheim’s idea to have his character, director turned manservant Max von Mayerling, write Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) fake fan letters to bolster her illusion that she was still famous.