By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on December 12, 2020)

Five Graves to Cairo – Kino Classics

Billy Wilder’s 1943 war drama tends to get short shrift from film scholars (understandable if held up next to Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment and other heralded entries in the director’s impressive canon), but it’s solid, slam-bang “popcorn” fare for movie night.

Five Graves to Cairo was the second Hollywood feature from the Austrian-born film maker. Adapted by Wilder and Charles Brackett from the Lajos Biro play “Hotel Imperial”, it is essentially a chamber piece set in a remote hotel in the North African desert. Like Casablanca (released a year earlier), it is a contemporaneously produced WW2 adventure brimming with intrigue, selfless heroics and of course-evil Nazis.

In this case the chief villain is a real-life WW2 luminary, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, played with larger-than-life aplomb by veteran scene-stealer Erich von Stroheim (who would give his most memorable performance 7 years later in Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard).

Leading man Franchot Tone portrays a wounded British tank crewman who stumbles into the hotel half-alive a few days before Rommel and his entourage arrive for a rest from the desert campaign. Anne Baxter and Akim Tamiroff round off the excellent principal cast.

Kino’s Blu-ray features a 4K remaster that highlights John F. Seitz’s cinematography and an enlightening commentary track by film historian Joseph McBride.