5 Star

Melodrama at its Best.

#237 in the Masters of Cinema range brings us another Billy Wilder (Witness For The Prosecution, The Apartment, A Foreign Affair, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) classic wartime thriller, this time a film from his early career, and you can see the makings of a great director from all the varied scenes in this film. And you can see by his credits he went on to greater things.

1942 June and the British eighth army has been routed from Tobruk by Rommel’s Afrika Korps, he is pushing them back to Cairo.

A lone British tank meanders across the sands of Africa as the drivers rig amortized foot keeps the tank rolling and his head steers the tank, as the lieutenants dead eyes look out across the burning landscape. Inside in the exhaust filled interior a body lurches as the tank crests yet another dune. Corporal John Bramble (Franchot Tone, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Bride Wore Red, Jigsaw) discovers he is the sole survivor of their encounter with the enemy.

He goes up for fresh air only to collapse and get thrown from the tank, he comes around to see the tank leaving him behind, he gives chase, but to no avail. He crawls along the sand for an unknown amount of time until he comes to a hard surface, a road and the small village Sidi Halfaga and the British base of command the Empress of Britain hotel.

Suffering from severe sunstroke, he staggers to the hotel believing that the British are still in residence, but they pulled out the night before. And now only the hotel owner Farid (Akim Tamiroff, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Yangtse Incident) and his French maid Mouche (Anne Baxter, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Ten Commandments, Seven Vengeful Women) remain. The pair try to help him by giving him water with salt which he gulps down but it is too little too late, and he passes out from exhaustion. Farid wants to help him, but Mouche is nonplussed as they hear the Germans coming into the village. They get him behind the counter just as Lt. Schwegler (Peter van Eyck, The Longest Day, The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) the aid to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Erich von Stroheim, The Wedding March, Sunset Blvd.) comes in.

Bramble is slumped behind the hotels counter and a German Lt. Schwegler is interrogating both Farid and Mouche and he also wants to know where a Paul Davos is and when Farid tells him he is dead due to the German bombings the previous night, the lieutenant is most displeased.

“Nothing wrong with Egypt,”

“Oh no Sir”

“Except too many British and too many flies.

“Yes Sir!”

Schwegler caries on with his duties as the radio equipment is brought in and set up on the counter, which get Farid and Mouche quite worried as they do not see what has happened to Bramble. He has climbed into the counter and makes his escape when the soldiers move the counter to the other side of the room. Bramble has only one option, he must take on the identity of the hotel’s waiter, a club-footed man by the name of Paul Davos under the guise that he didn’t die but was buried alive and it took him hours to dig himself out.

Can Bramble survive the German loving French maid and the Germans he is surrounded by or the opera loving Italian general Sebastiano (Fortunio Bonanova, Citizen Kane, Romance on the High Seas)?

Five Graves to Cairo is a great afternoon thriller for  anybody into their wartime dramas.

Five Graves to Cairo is available on Blu-ray

SPECIAL EDITION BLU-RAY FEATURES:

 

1080p presentation on Blu-ray for the first time ever in the UK from a brand new 4K restoration
Uncompressed LPCM audio (original mono presentation)
Audio commentary by film scholar Adrian Martin
Billy Wilder on Five Graves to Cairo
“Five Graves to Cairo” episode of Lux Radio Theatre, originally aired in 1943, starring Franchot Tone and Anne Baxter
Theatrical trailer
A collector s booklet featuring new writing by critic Richard Combs; and an archival article from 1944 about Wilder and Charles Brackett