Five Graves To Cairo

Although Billy Wilder and his team, including cinematographer John F. Seitz, who would shoot some of the director's best-known films including Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard, give this wartime espionage story a good degree of visual panache, the outcome is never convincing and even bordering on the silly.

An adaptation of a play, Hotel Imperial by Lajos Biro, the handling of the key plot element, a British soldier (Franchot Tone) being mistaken by the Nazis for one of their own agents is fundamentally flawed, the supposedly well-informed Germans not only having no idea what their agent looks like but failing to notice his polished British diction. Scripted by Wilder with Charles Brackett, a combination that had been somewhat more felicitous in the previous year's romantic comedy The Major and The Minor, which also had a mistaken identity as it core concept, the story limps along as an ungainly adventure yarn combining dramatic realism with stereotyped comedy recalling the work of Wilder's mentor, Ernst Lubitsch, complete with a buffoon of an Italian general, a stammering Egyptian hotelier (Akim Tamiroff), a feisty French maid (Anne Baxter) and a gaggle of public school British officers, not to mention the film's most enjoyable aspect, an imperious performance by Erich Von Stroheim as Rommel.

DVD Extras: The all new restored print looks very good but has a rather noisy soundtrack and comes with an insert essay by RMIT film academic Adrian Danks; the original theatrical trailer; and a Hollywood Remembers profile of Anne Baxter.

Available from: Madman

 

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