FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO (1943) - October 14th

Much attention is paid--and justifiably so--to Billy Wilder's first and third films as a Hollywood director. His American debut was a comedy, The Major and the Minor (1942), with Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland--a film Rogers considered one of her best. His third Hollywood effort, the film noir Double Indemnity (1944), earned seven Oscar® nominations, including two for Wilder (director and writer). But Wilder's second American picture musn't be ignored. Five Graves to Cairo (1943) is a thrilling World War II story, a character drama set against the backdrop of the British Eighth Army's fight against German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel in Africa in 1942.

The movie sounds sweeping but plays small thanks to outstanding performances, the type Wilder elicited for the next 30 years. Franchot Tone stars as a British corporal, the only surviving member of a tank crew killed in battle. Dehydrated and delirious, he stumbles into a hotel that has only two remaining employees, the owner, played with good humor and great fear by Akim Tamiroff, and a chamber maid played by Anne Baxter. When the Germans take over the hotel, Tone assumes the identity of a dead waiter to stay alive and ultimately--perhaps--keep Rommel from taking Cairo. Erich Von Stroheim is Rommel, and plays him with a ruthlessness unseen in future portrayals. Baxter, though, gives the movie's seminal performance, a complicated portrayal of an enigmatic woman, reluctant yet calculating, hostile to Tone yet loyal to her family.

Wilder's mastery of multiple genres is now well established, but just stop and consider those first three films. They're not remotely alike, save for their razor sharp scripts; and in that, even this war picture flashes Wilder's wit. Informed by Tamiroff and Baxter that the hotel has two bathrooms, one functioning and one not, a German lieutenant, expressing disdain for his Italian allies, tells Tamiroff that German officers will take rooms near the working bathroom. The "one with the bathroom that doesn't work," he says, "goes to the Italian general."

by Ben Mankiewicz