Five Graves to Cairo (1943)
July 10, 2022 10:23 PM - Subscribe
In the North African campaign a British straggler manages to pass himself off as a waiter at the hotel commandeered as Rommel's headquarters. He has thoughts of assassinating Rommel but his cover may have an even better use.
It's World War II, and British soldier John Bramble (Franchot Tone) is the lone survivor of a brutal battle in Egypt. After wandering through the desert, Bramble finds a remote hotel. There, in order to stay alive, he assumes a false identity. When the famed German general Rommel (Erich von Stroheim), aka the Desert Fox, arrives at the hotel, Bramble realizes he's being taken for a German spy. Can this lowly British soldier turn the tide in the war and foil Germany's plans in North Africa?
Bosley Crowther: It's a good thing the German armies and Field Marshal Rommel in particular had been chased all the way out of Africa before "Five Graves to Cairo" opened at the Paramount yesterday, else the performance by Erich von Stroheim of the much-touted field marshal in it might have been just a bit too aggressive for the comfort of most of us. As a matter of fact, it is still a shade on the terrifying side. For Mr. von Stroheim has all other movie Huns backed completely off the screen. Just as he was in the last war, he is still the toughest German of them all. And whenever he appears in this picture, a swaggering bully waving a tasseled fly-swatter, he gives you the creeps and the shivers. Boy, what a nasty Hun!It isn't that he is bluntly brutal. He shows qualities which command respect—the respect which one has for a viper or a particularly cunning fox. You sense his strength, his authority, his militaristic drive—and you also perceive his vanity and reckless braggadocio. He plays the sort of German you simply can't laugh off—a little smoke-cured around the edges but tough and formidable at the core. There is one sequence in this picture wherein the field marshal is entertaining captured British officers with boasts of his Rommel plan that literally makes you feel anxious lest you sneeze and be caught eavesdropping.Completely out of key with the performance of Mr. von Stroheim is the rest of "Five Graves to Cairo." For otherwise it is simply an incredible comedy-melodrama—yes, comedy is what we said—about a British tank-corps corporal who gets left behind in Sidi Halfaya (when the British retreated last June), poses as a loyal German agent in the flea-bag hotel which Rommel's staff occupies, learns the amazing secret of German supply depots set lip before the war across the desert—and then escapes with that secret back to the British lines. This remarkable information (it says here) permitted the rout of the Axis forces at El Alamein.As though this fanciful story weren't sufficiently hard to take, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, a couple of old-hand Paramount wags, have dressed it up with shenanigans which have the flavor of fun in a haunted house. Akim Tamiroff plays an Egyptian innkeeper broadly and strictly for laughs, and Fortunio Bonanova is rung in as an Italian general of the opéra-bouffe type. With those two clowns in the picture, fetching laughs with smoke-house burlesque; with Franchot Tone playing the British corporal in a taut and muted style and with Mr. von Stroheim playing Rommel with a realism that chills the bones—not to mention a little side issue between Peter Van Eyck as a Nazi officer and Anne Baxter as an expatriate French maid — "Five Graves to Cairo" is probably the most conglomerate war film to date. It has a little something for all tastes, provided you don't give a darn.
Kevin Ibbotson-Wight: Time has covered Five Graves to Cairo in a layer of topsoil that requires some excavating to get to its contemporary significance as a propaganda piece, albeit one with some ambivalent caveats. Much of the film plays like a high-stakes farce, which retrospectively seems like an odd tone to strike given its release mere months after the Allies’ decisive blow in the Western Desert campaign (in fact filming began less than two months after the conclusion of the Second Battle of El Alamein). The atmosphere is notably different from the likes of Noël Coward and David Lean‘s purposefully stirring In Which We Serve, or even, from the Axis perspective, Akira Kurosawa‘s earnest ode to Stakhanovite self-sacrifice, The Most Beautiful. There is the requisite patriotic swagger in decisive moments, but there’s something grudging about it; an instinctive cynicism that the Austrian émigré Wilder would indulge more fully in the bitterly comic (and postwar) A Foreign Affair.
It’s unlikely to be a coincidence that this attitude is present in the two finest performances. Erich von Stroheim is an obvious standout as the infamous ‘Desert Fox’ Erwin Rommel. A parallel role to that of his aristocratic Captain in Jean Renoir‘s first world war drama La Grande Illusion, von Stroheim is carefully distinguished from both the cruel, duplicitous Nazi Lt. Schwegler (Peter van Eyck) and Bonanova‘s flamboyant but dim-witted fascista Sebastiano. Perhaps Wilder was aware of Rommel’s allegedly equivocal relationship to Nazism. He’s certainly partly credited with the rehabilitation of the field marshal’s postwar reputation. As Rommel isn’t presented as directly villainous, neither is Anne Baxter’s Mouche completely in line with Bramble’s mission. Mouche feverishly resents the British for the evacuation of Dunkirk which left members of her family to their fates. She represents the chaotic, ambiguous and constantly fluctuating fortunes and allegiances of war, and symbolises an unwillingness to resort to the characteristic tubthumping that would come to dominate British war discourse, which was already scrambling to paint a heavy defeat as a victory for English pluck.
Wilder wasn’t quite the master at judging the level of astringency to apply to his scenarios at this point, although Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend were just around the corner. Five Graves to Cairo feels caught between two conflicting instincts. It’s just rousing enough for a studio clamouring for inspirational material, but it’s also clear Wilder and Brackett blanched at the thought of creating outright propaganda. With the wartime context removed, it’s fundamentally the age-old tension between art and commerce. On its own terms, it’s an entirely enjoyable war drama, but certainly not up there with Wilder’s finest works.
Raymond Benson: Billy Wilder, an Austrian Jew who had fled Germany as the Nazis gained power, settled in Hollywood in 1933 after a brief stint in France. He immediately found work as a talented screenwriter, ultimately earning his first Oscar nomination for co-writing Ninotchka (1939). As war heated up in the 1940s, Wilder then became, after the likes of Preston Sturges, a rare Hollywood double threat writer/director. Five Graves to Cairo is only his second picture as a director, and it's one of those propaganda war films that could be classified as an classic.
In the flavor of Casablanca, Five Graves is also a spy movie in a way. The plot involves British tank corporal John Bramble (Franchot Tone), who, after his crew is wiped out in the North African desert, makes his way to Sidi Halfaya in a delirium. He stumbles into a hotel, the Empress of Britain, run by an Egyptian, Farid (Akim Tamiroff). Also present in the desolated hotel is the French maid, Mouche (Anne Baxter). The Germans, led by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Erich von Stroheim, of course) are on their way to town, and they'll be staying at the hotel. The British had recently been run out of town and are regrouping at El Alamein. Lieutenant Schwegler (Peter van Eyck) arrives with men ahead of Rommel to fix up security and make arrangements for his commanding officer. In a pinch, Bramble must impersonate the dead waiter of the hotel, a man called Davos. It turns out that Davos, who had a peg leg, was a German spy who had made regular reports on British movements before he was killed. This gives Bramble the opportunity to play double agent and ferret out Rommel's secret of hidden supply dumps in Egypt known as the five graves to Cairo. Throw in a love/hate conflict between Bramble and Mouche, and you've got the makings of a terrific war thriller.
Five Graves to Cairo is well-made, tightly written (by Wilder, with longtime scribe partner Charles Brackett), and superbly acted. Tone, while not being an A-level star per se, carries the movie well. Baxter, speaking with a European accent that isn't quite French, is suitable enough and certainly exudes screen chemistry. Erich von Stroheim almost steals the picture as Rommel, doing his typical German officer routine we've seen before; he makes a terrific heavy for the tale. Tamiroff's purpose is primarily comic relief, and he always fulfills that duty with skill.
Trailer
It's World War II, and British soldier John Bramble (Franchot Tone) is the lone survivor of a brutal battle in Egypt. After wandering through the desert, Bramble finds a remote hotel. There, in order to stay alive, he assumes a false identity. When the famed German general Rommel (Erich von Stroheim), aka the Desert Fox, arrives at the hotel, Bramble realizes he's being taken for a German spy. Can this lowly British soldier turn the tide in the war and foil Germany's plans in North Africa?
Bosley Crowther: It's a good thing the German armies and Field Marshal Rommel in particular had been chased all the way out of Africa before "Five Graves to Cairo" opened at the Paramount yesterday, else the performance by Erich von Stroheim of the much-touted field marshal in it might have been just a bit too aggressive for the comfort of most of us. As a matter of fact, it is still a shade on the terrifying side. For Mr. von Stroheim has all other movie Huns backed completely off the screen. Just as he was in the last war, he is still the toughest German of them all. And whenever he appears in this picture, a swaggering bully waving a tasseled fly-swatter, he gives you the creeps and the shivers. Boy, what a nasty Hun!It isn't that he is bluntly brutal. He shows qualities which command respect—the respect which one has for a viper or a particularly cunning fox. You sense his strength, his authority, his militaristic drive—and you also perceive his vanity and reckless braggadocio. He plays the sort of German you simply can't laugh off—a little smoke-cured around the edges but tough and formidable at the core. There is one sequence in this picture wherein the field marshal is entertaining captured British officers with boasts of his Rommel plan that literally makes you feel anxious lest you sneeze and be caught eavesdropping.Completely out of key with the performance of Mr. von Stroheim is the rest of "Five Graves to Cairo." For otherwise it is simply an incredible comedy-melodrama—yes, comedy is what we said—about a British tank-corps corporal who gets left behind in Sidi Halfaya (when the British retreated last June), poses as a loyal German agent in the flea-bag hotel which Rommel's staff occupies, learns the amazing secret of German supply depots set lip before the war across the desert—and then escapes with that secret back to the British lines. This remarkable information (it says here) permitted the rout of the Axis forces at El Alamein.As though this fanciful story weren't sufficiently hard to take, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, a couple of old-hand Paramount wags, have dressed it up with shenanigans which have the flavor of fun in a haunted house. Akim Tamiroff plays an Egyptian innkeeper broadly and strictly for laughs, and Fortunio Bonanova is rung in as an Italian general of the opéra-bouffe type. With those two clowns in the picture, fetching laughs with smoke-house burlesque; with Franchot Tone playing the British corporal in a taut and muted style and with Mr. von Stroheim playing Rommel with a realism that chills the bones—not to mention a little side issue between Peter Van Eyck as a Nazi officer and Anne Baxter as an expatriate French maid — "Five Graves to Cairo" is probably the most conglomerate war film to date. It has a little something for all tastes, provided you don't give a darn.
Kevin Ibbotson-Wight: Time has covered Five Graves to Cairo in a layer of topsoil that requires some excavating to get to its contemporary significance as a propaganda piece, albeit one with some ambivalent caveats. Much of the film plays like a high-stakes farce, which retrospectively seems like an odd tone to strike given its release mere months after the Allies’ decisive blow in the Western Desert campaign (in fact filming began less than two months after the conclusion of the Second Battle of El Alamein). The atmosphere is notably different from the likes of Noël Coward and David Lean‘s purposefully stirring In Which We Serve, or even, from the Axis perspective, Akira Kurosawa‘s earnest ode to Stakhanovite self-sacrifice, The Most Beautiful. There is the requisite patriotic swagger in decisive moments, but there’s something grudging about it; an instinctive cynicism that the Austrian émigré Wilder would indulge more fully in the bitterly comic (and postwar) A Foreign Affair.
It’s unlikely to be a coincidence that this attitude is present in the two finest performances. Erich von Stroheim is an obvious standout as the infamous ‘Desert Fox’ Erwin Rommel. A parallel role to that of his aristocratic Captain in Jean Renoir‘s first world war drama La Grande Illusion, von Stroheim is carefully distinguished from both the cruel, duplicitous Nazi Lt. Schwegler (Peter van Eyck) and Bonanova‘s flamboyant but dim-witted fascista Sebastiano. Perhaps Wilder was aware of Rommel’s allegedly equivocal relationship to Nazism. He’s certainly partly credited with the rehabilitation of the field marshal’s postwar reputation. As Rommel isn’t presented as directly villainous, neither is Anne Baxter’s Mouche completely in line with Bramble’s mission. Mouche feverishly resents the British for the evacuation of Dunkirk which left members of her family to their fates. She represents the chaotic, ambiguous and constantly fluctuating fortunes and allegiances of war, and symbolises an unwillingness to resort to the characteristic tubthumping that would come to dominate British war discourse, which was already scrambling to paint a heavy defeat as a victory for English pluck.
Wilder wasn’t quite the master at judging the level of astringency to apply to his scenarios at this point, although Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend were just around the corner. Five Graves to Cairo feels caught between two conflicting instincts. It’s just rousing enough for a studio clamouring for inspirational material, but it’s also clear Wilder and Brackett blanched at the thought of creating outright propaganda. With the wartime context removed, it’s fundamentally the age-old tension between art and commerce. On its own terms, it’s an entirely enjoyable war drama, but certainly not up there with Wilder’s finest works.
Raymond Benson: Billy Wilder, an Austrian Jew who had fled Germany as the Nazis gained power, settled in Hollywood in 1933 after a brief stint in France. He immediately found work as a talented screenwriter, ultimately earning his first Oscar nomination for co-writing Ninotchka (1939). As war heated up in the 1940s, Wilder then became, after the likes of Preston Sturges, a rare Hollywood double threat writer/director. Five Graves to Cairo is only his second picture as a director, and it's one of those propaganda war films that could be classified as an classic.
In the flavor of Casablanca, Five Graves is also a spy movie in a way. The plot involves British tank corporal John Bramble (Franchot Tone), who, after his crew is wiped out in the North African desert, makes his way to Sidi Halfaya in a delirium. He stumbles into a hotel, the Empress of Britain, run by an Egyptian, Farid (Akim Tamiroff). Also present in the desolated hotel is the French maid, Mouche (Anne Baxter). The Germans, led by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Erich von Stroheim, of course) are on their way to town, and they'll be staying at the hotel. The British had recently been run out of town and are regrouping at El Alamein. Lieutenant Schwegler (Peter van Eyck) arrives with men ahead of Rommel to fix up security and make arrangements for his commanding officer. In a pinch, Bramble must impersonate the dead waiter of the hotel, a man called Davos. It turns out that Davos, who had a peg leg, was a German spy who had made regular reports on British movements before he was killed. This gives Bramble the opportunity to play double agent and ferret out Rommel's secret of hidden supply dumps in Egypt known as the five graves to Cairo. Throw in a love/hate conflict between Bramble and Mouche, and you've got the makings of a terrific war thriller.
Five Graves to Cairo is well-made, tightly written (by Wilder, with longtime scribe partner Charles Brackett), and superbly acted. Tone, while not being an A-level star per se, carries the movie well. Baxter, speaking with a European accent that isn't quite French, is suitable enough and certainly exudes screen chemistry. Erich von Stroheim almost steals the picture as Rommel, doing his typical German officer routine we've seen before; he makes a terrific heavy for the tale. Tamiroff's purpose is primarily comic relief, and he always fulfills that duty with skill.
Trailer
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posted by Carillon at 10:39 PM on July 10, 2022 [1 favorite]