Five Graves to Cairo
A lone tank of the British Eighth Army rolls across the African desert just past the border into Egypt, the crew dead from bullets or unconscious from heat, exhaustion or the fumes leaking from the engine; one survivor, Corporal John Bramble, falls from the turret, watching helplessly as the tank continues blindly on its way without him.
Crawling through the sand, Bramble finds a settlement, Sidi Halfaya, collapsing in the foyer of the damaged Empress of Britain Hotel recently abandoned by the retreating British forces; is it salvation or damnation, or another form of purgatory? With only two staff still present, Farid and Mouche, they give him water but the German forces arrive before they are able to send him on his way.
If Bramble is found the Germans will shoot him as a spy and them for hiding a fugitive, so he assumes the identity of the waiter Davos, killed in an air raid, biding his time until he can escape, but with the notorious Field Marshal Erwin Rommel one of the new residents, the soldier feels it his duty to first strike a blow against the enemy regardless of the danger to them all.
The second film directed by the Austrian immigrant Billy Wilder in Hollywood, Five Graves to Cairo was co-written with his collaborator Charles Brackett, based on but substantially reworked from Lajos Bíró’s play Hotel Imperial (Színmű négy felvonásban), already filmed twice before, and rushed through production it was originally released in May 1943, only eighteen months after America had entered the Second World War.
Now making its UK Blu-ray debut as a 4K restoration as part of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema range, Five Graves to Cairo is quite obviously a propaganda piece, particularly in the final scenes designed to inspire bravado and confidence in audiences of the right and might of the Allied forces against the Axis of Evil represented by Rommel and his Italian counterpart General Sebastiano, but with the allegiances and goals of the characters shifting constantly it offers much more substance beneath that label.
Wilder most often associated with comedy, that strand offers the only respite from the near-constant tension of Five Graves to Cairo, a spy thriller of danger and subterfuge which demands sacrifice from characters more complex than a typical war movie; while Erich von Stroheim’s Rommel is an arrogant monster, dismissive of women and dining with his prisoners of war so he can belittle them, his first officer Lieutenant Schwegler is far from a stock villain.
Played by The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse‘s Peter van Eyck, the handsome and genuinely charming and Schwegler is sympathetic to Mouche (The Magnificent Ambersons‘ Anne Baxter) when she pleads with him to intervene on behalf of her brother held in a concentration camp, complicating her already difficult relationship with Bramble (Mutiny on the Bounty‘s Franchot Tone); if Rommel is assassinated, she will lose her only chance of securing her brother’s freedom.
Accompanied by an excerpt of a longer interview with Wilder and a radio adaptation of the film starring Tone and Baxter, film scholar Adrian Martin also provides an informed commentary on the production of Five Graves to Cairo, offering insight into the production process and the sometimes difficult personalities involved.
Five Graves to Cairo will be available on Blu-ray from Eureka from Monday 17th August
