Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

"I've looked and looked but there is no 'Y' in Egypt!" 

Our feature kicks off with the British 8th Army on the run with the German Afrika Korps hot on their heels. And after the fall of Tobruk in June, 1942, the plot-proper begins with the surreal sight of a lone, crippled British tank rocking its way through the seemingly endless sand dunes of North Africa. The entire crew is dead, save for Cpl. John Bramble, who, barely alive after sucking on exhaust fumes for who knows how long, manages to crawl his way out of this runaway death-trap.

Lost and delirious, Bramble (Tone) struggles through the heat and sand until he eventually stumbles into the small seaside town of Sidi Halfaya, where he finds refuge in the Empress of Britain, a local hotel, run by an oafish Egyptian named Farid (Tamifoff), who quickly hides the unconscious soldier despite the malignant indifference of a French girl named Mouche (Baxter); the last member of Farid’s housekeeping staff that hasn’t run off or been killed in the constant air-raids or artillery bombardments, who warns what will happen to them if they get caught hiding the enemy. 

You see, unfortunately, this hotel is now located in German occupied territory and has been pegged to be the new command center of the Desert Fox himself, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Von Stroheim). Luckily for Bramble, he is able to assume the identity of Davos -- Farid’s recently deceased club-footed waiter, currently buried under some rubble in the basement cellar from the latest air-raid, before he is discovered.

But, this luck has a fine razor's edge to it. Turns out this Davos was a German mole who spied on the British when they occupied the hotel. So, while this allows the fake Davos to be trusted to move freely amongst the enemy, he is also in constant danger of getting recognized as not being who he claims to be -- on top of being expected to know certain things he possibly couldn't.

Thus, Bramble as Davos must carefully bluff his way through several dicey conversations; and as he traverses this precarious, razor-wire tightrope, with some reluctant help from Mouche, who has her own agenda to work with the Germans, Bramble keeps his eyes and ears open, with a hope to find some vital detail to unravel the enigma of the "Five Graves" that will hopefully derail Rommel's march to Cairo and the eventual seizure of the Suez Canal. For if that falls into the Reich's clutches, says Herr Rommel, then Churchill will be forced to take that "big fat cigar out of his mouth and say, 'Heil Hitler!’”

The screenwriting tandem of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett first worked together on Ernst Lubitsch's screwball comedy, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). And after What a Life (1939) and Midnight (1939), the duo teamed up with Lubitsch again on Ninotchka (1939), a career redefining role for Greta Garbo, which earned them their first Academy Award nomination. (They would lose to Sidney Howard and Gone With the Wind (1939), which steamrolled through the Oscars that year.) Wilder would receive dual nominations in 1941 for best original story with Thomas Monroe on Ball of Fire (1941), a delightful, jazzy twist on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and with Brackett for best original screenplay for Hold Back the Dawn (1941). (He would lose both to Harry Segall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941).

But! Despite getting skunked on all these nominations, this string of box-office successes generated by their screenplays for Paramount gave Wilder just enough rope to try and secure the director’s seat on their next collaboration, The Major and the Minor (1942). "The thing to do was suggest an idea, have it torn apart and despised. In a few days it would be apt to turn up again, slightly changed, as Wilder's idea,” said Brackett in “It’s the Pictures that Got Small,” a collection of diary entries edited together by Anthony Slide, which chronicled working with Wilder and how their process worked -- that honestly reads like dispatches from the front by some grizzled war correspondent. “Once I got adjusted to that way of working, our lives were simpler."

 Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

Now, before he migrated to Hollywood, Wilder had directed one feature in Europe -- Mauvaise Graine (1934), released domestically as Bad Seed, and, not wanting to be relegated to a typewriter for the rest of his career, he convinced producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. -- who had produced the Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard comedy spook-shows, The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers (1940), to let him make his pitch to Ginger Rogers on a proposed adaptation of the play, Connie Comes Home.

Coming off her Oscar winning performance in Kitty Foyle (1940), Rogers had earned enough clout to pick her own pictures and have a say on who directed them. Both Rogers and Wilder shared the same agent, Leland Hayward, who arranged a meeting. The two hit it off immediately, and the picture was a go with Wilder directing and Rogers headlining. And while the role of Major Phillip Kirby was written with Cary Grant in mind, as the legend goes according to Wilder, it was a chance meeting at a stoplight, and an offer through an open window, that got Ray Milland involved in the picture.

“When I became a director ... my technical knowledge was very meager," said Wilder in a later interview. And to compensate for this, Wilder relied heavily on his editor, Doane Harrison, during the filming of The Major and the Minor. Harrison had been the editor on Hold Back the Dawn, and Wilder had him on set from shot one. “I worked with a very good cutter, from whom I learned a great deal. He was much more of a help to me than the cameraman.” See, Harrison taught Wilder how to cut “in camera,” resulting in a minimal amount of film being expended and very little coverage, which had less to do with saving money and more to do with eliminating the possibility of the studio later going back and re-cutting things or adding footage the director had deemed unnecessary. “When I finish a film,” Wilder added, “there is nothing on the cutting room floor but chewing gum wrappers and tears."

When The Major and the Minor proved to be another box-office smash, Paramount rewarded Wilder with his choice on what he wanted to do next. And what Wilder wanted to do was another adaptation of Lajos Biro’s play, Hotel Imperial, which had already been adapted to the screen in 1927 by Mauritz Stiller, in 1936 as I Loved a Soldier by Henry Hathaway, and in 1939 by Robert Florey. And while Brackett found the play and all the adaptations rather dreadful -- and that’s putting it mildly, Wilder was hellbent and soon had the studio onboard.

In the original play, the action takes place on the Eastern Front during the first World War, specifically a town caught in the no man’s land between the Russians and the Austrians, which has changed hands so many times its denizens aren’t really sure who is in charge from day to day. Enter Ann Warschaska, who is there to avenge the suicide of her sister after she was betrayed by an Austrian officer. But the only clue to his identity is the number of the room he’s staying in at the Hotel Imperial, where she gets a job as a maid and befriends a Russian general, who currently holds the town. 

When she finally makes her move on room 12, she discovers Nemassy, a young Austrian officer hiding out after getting left behind, whom she plans to turn over to the Russians in her bid for revenge. However, she soon discovers the hotel has two room 12s, and in the other is the real culprit; a Russian spy, who was a mole planted in the Austrian army. And from there, Ann and Nemassy team up to eliminate the spy and escape the hotel for friendlier environs.

In their version, Wilder and Brackett shifted the action to the second World War and the location from the Russian front to the deserts of North Africa. They also shifted the characters around, bringing Nemassy to the front as Bramble and shifting Ann to a secondary character with Mouche. Here, initially, Mouche and Bramble do not get along because the girl despises the British, believing they abandoned the French at Dunkirk, including her brother, who was severely wounded and is now languishing in a prisoner of war camp. And in an effort to secure his release, she starts to fraternize with the enemy -- first with Rommel, which goes nowhere, and then one of his underlings, Lt. Schwegler (Van Eyck), who strings the girl along but has no intention of ever really doing anything.

Meantime, fearing it will derail all her efforts, Mouche thwarts Bramble’s attempt to assassinate Rommel before “Davos” is sent on to Cairo to once again spy on the British. His mission changes when Rommel hosts several captured British officers for dinner, who are the first to recognize Bramble is not the real Davos. Here, Bramble is able to clandestinely explain how he came to be in this predicament with his superiors, who charge him to turn the tables on the Germans and gather all the intelligence that he can to share with the British high command once he reaches Cairo.

Thus and so, Bramble keeps his eyes and ears open as Rommel allows his captive audience to ask him twenty questions about his plans to take Cairo and seize the Suez Canal. And from this conversation, along with some further digging, Bramble discovers that while posing as an archeological expedition in Egypt before the war, Rommel had secretly prepared five hidden supply dumps of gas and munitions -- which he refers to as the Five Graves. As to their location, all Bramble has are some cryptic references to a point Y, P and T. Thinking these are the first letters to certain cities, Bramble scrambles to find the most probable locations on Rommel’s maps -- only he can find no city, village or oasis that begins with the letter Y.

Alas, when the quarter finally drops for our hero, everyone must take shelter in the hotel’s cellar, where the current Allied bombing raid unearths the real Davos’ corpse, which is discovered by Schwelger. And as the bombs continue to fall, Schwelger chases Bramble throughout the blacked-out hotel, until he is killed in the quarters Bramble shares with Mouche. When the body is discovered, Mouche is ready to rat out Bramble for ruining everything until Rommel accuses her of killing his underling because she found out he’d been lying all along about helping her brother. 

With that, Mouche decides to take one for the team, so to speak, and confesses to the murder, which allows Bramble to take Rommel’s secrets on to Cairo. But before he leaves, Bramble instructs Farid to come forward during her eventual trial with evidence that “Davos” was the one who really killed Schwelger.

Originally, Wilder wanted Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman for his leads in Five Graves to Cairo; but even though they proved untenable, Franchot Tone and Anne Baxter do just fine as the bickering protagonists that are hamstrung by some strong sexual tension as they pursue their own ends. Wilder did get his first choice for Rommel, and allowed Eric Von Stroheim to run wild with the character's wardrobe and accouterments.

Behind the camera, Wilder and cinematographer John Sietz turned the lights down low and kept them there, giving things a nice, noirish flare as characters slink around in the shadows and in the dark. On screen, the espionage and intrigue are taut and suspenseful as Bramble barely stays one (club-footed) step ahead of the Germans. And if I have one beef with the film, and it's a minor one, is that the overt comedy elements, supplied mostly by Akim Tamiroff's buffoonish Farid, don't really gel all that well with -- and distract from, the overall tone of the film.

Paramount released the film in 1943, not long after the British stopped Rommel cold at El Alamein. History shows that the good guys would eventually win the day, and they win the day in Five Graves to Cairo, too, but not without a great cost. In the film, Bramble’s information allows the Allies to blow-up Rommel’s remaining supply dumps, leading to that (cinematic) victory at El Alamein. But when Bramble returns to Sidi Halfaya in triumph, he discovers Mouche was executed by the Germans, even though she was exonerated of Schwegler's murder, due to her aiding and abetting the enemy over her insistence that the British would be back. 

Here, Bramble takes the parasol he bought for the girl in Cairo, something she had always wanted, and uses it to provide shade for her grave, where he posthumously informs her she was right -- the British came back; and not just the British, but the Americans, Canadians and all free-thinking Allies, who are going to chase Rommel all the way back to Germany, and they will keep on pushing until final victory is achieved.

As the story goes, looking back on it several years later, Brackett always bemoaned the fact that Five Graves to Cairo had "the dreadful smell of propaganda" to it. Eh, I think that sells the film way too short. Yes, there are a few spotlight speeches on why we fight, but I think those scenes only add pressure to the proceedings. This was only 1943, remember; and despite the recent victories the war was still far from over; and who would be the eventual victors was still very much in doubt. As for me, the film was a resounding victory. This was my introduction to Wilder, and Brackett, when I caught this on Matinee at the Bijou many, many, many moons ago via our local PBS affiliate and it always stuck with me. And while not as well known as Wilder's screwball comedies -- The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like it Hot (1959), his film noir -- Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), or his biting social commentaries -- The Lost Weekend (1945), Ace in the Hole (1951), The Apartment (1960), or even his only other war movie, Stalag 17 (1953), this one is well worth the watch and is ripe for rediscovery. Get to it, won't you? Thank you.

Originally posted on April 24, 2010, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

Five Graves to Cairo (1943) Paramount Pictures / EP: Buddy G. DeSylva / P: Charles Brackett / D: Billy Wilder / W: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Lajos Biró (play) / C: John F. Seitz / E: Doane Harrison / M: Miklós Rózsa / S: Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Erich von Stroheim, Akim Tamiroff, Peter van Eyck