A British tank crewman stumbles across the desert, delirious, and somehow makes it to a hotel in North Africa called the Empress of Britain. So begins Billy Wilder's 1943 American propaganda film Five Graves to Cairo. Like most of Wilder's movies, this one has a very sharp screenplay, in this case by Wilder and Charles Brackett. Stars Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, and Erich von Stoheim put in good performances, too.
Baxter's is the most memorable. She plays a French chambermaid named Mouche who has somehow ended up working in this North African hotel. It later turns out she has resentment for the British for how they handled Dunkirk and, while she won't squeal on John (Tone) when Rommel (Von Stroheim) and his men take over the hotel, she still wants to find favour with someone in the German brass. She has a brother in a concentration camp and she's willing to do anything to get him out. The film, despite having been made during the era of the Hays Code, manages to make it clear that means sexual favours.
Her tragic story plays effectively alongside the more straightforward adventure tale of John's. He masquerades as a waiter who'd been killed in a bombardment before the Germans came. Then he finds out that waiter was a German agent. So he finds himself pretending to be a waiter pretending to be a Nazi spy.
The film nicely keeps up the tension on his predicament. There's never any real chemistry between him and Baxter which is perhaps why this film hasn't garnered the same kind of veneration as Casablanca or other great wartime films. But it's still pretty good.
Five Graves to Cairo is available on The Criterion Channel as part of this month's collection of 1940s Billy Wilder movies.
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