Filmmaker Billy Wilder is best known as the director of such comedies as The Seven Year Itch and Some Like it Hot, films with an edge of social satire and a dollop of sex, but he was equally adept at dramas and thrillers. For Five Graves to Cairo, his second American film as a director, Wilder, and co-writer Charles Brackett updated a 1917 Hungarian play from World War I to World WarI I and relocated the action to 1942 North Africa during the British retreat from Field Marshall Rommel's advance through the desert.
The film opens with a stark, striking sequence: a lost British tank riding the sand dunes like an armored Flying Dutchman, the crew either dead or unconscious. Franchot Tone plays the sole survivor, Corporal John Bramble, who is hidden from the invading Germans by an Egyptian hotel owner (Orson Welles regular Akim Tamiroff). Trapped behind enemy lines, Bramble takes the identity of hotel's waiter, who just happened to be a Nazi agent, and is now tasked with playing undercover agent to get Rommel's invasion plans. Anne Baxter plays the French chambermaid Mouche, a cynic who blames the British for her brother's capture at Normandy, and Erich von Stroheim is Rommel, a fastidious, aristocratic officer who plays the charming host to captured British officers while arrogantly snubbing his Italian ally (Fortunio Bonanova as the opera-singing Italian General).
While its stage origins are evident as the espionage thriller plays out in the close quarters of a crumbling desert hotel and our amateur spy uses his wits and wiles to keep up his identity, Wilder keeps the tension taut with his crisp direction and measured pacing. The sharp black and white cinematography by John Seitz gives the battered hotel adrift in a sea of sand its own identity, and it earned one of the film's three Oscar nominations.
Back in 1943, the film had a ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy. Today it plays as a smart, well-tuned thriller with a terrific cast of characters actors, and a sharp wit. Kino Lorber presents the Blu-ray debut in a new 4K master that shows off the Oscar-nominated cinematography. Also features informative commentary by film historian Joseph McBride. Recommended.