Review: Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo on KL Studio Classics Blu-ray

Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo begins in the wake of the Axis capture of Tobruk, with Corporal John J. Bramble (Franchot Tone), the lone survivor of an attack on his unit’s tank, stumbling through the Sahara Desert before arriving at the Empress of Britain. The bombed-out hotel functions, not unlike Rick’s Cafe in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, as an essential gathering place for soldiers and civilians from various warring nations in the midst of World War II. The confluence of cultures and ideologies that define this place is well-suited to Wilder’s cosmopolitan sensibilities, and he and frequent co-writer Charles Brackett lend the clashes that ensue between the film’s characters a delightfully black humor, bringing levity to dire circumstances without undercutting their significance.

France is represented by the prickly Mouche (Anne Baxter), a chambermaid who fled her Nazi-controlled homeland and holds a grudge against the British for presumably abandoning her brothers in Dunkirk. Italy’s kowtowing to the Hitler is mirrored in the buffoonish, opera-singing General Sebastiano (Fortunio Bonanova), a mistreated guest of the Germans, while the Arabs of North Africa are signified by the skittish hotel manager, Farid (Akim Tamiroff). As for the ruthless Nazi Germans, the sneering, sinewy Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Erich von Stroheim), who leads a Nazi brigade to take control of Northern Africa, is certainly a prototypical representative of the group. And while Bramble emerges as the film’s protagonist—as he assumes the identity of the hotel’s deceased, club-footed waiter, Davos, only to learn that the man was also a German spy—it’s von Stroheim who steals every scene he’s in.

Adorned in tightly fitting, white military regalia, and sporting a cocked cap and a bullwhip cum flyswatter, von Stroheim essentially reprises his role as the suave, arrogant officer from his 1922 silent-era masterpiece Foolish Wives. Rommel’s deadpan antics aren’t only amusing, they also speak to the nascent weaknesses that arise from his unwavering belief in the superiority of his race and nationality. “Of course. Nobody hates the Germans,” the field marshal blurts out at one point, and in such a blasé tone that it’s clear just how genuinely he believes the sentiment. It’s an ironic counterpoint to the fact that nearly every non-German in the film is secretly conspiring against him, but von Stroheim sells the man’s hubris with such gusto that the moment is simultaneously authentic and funny.

Five Graves to Cairo, though, is first and foremost an espionage thriller, and it spends much of its 96-minute running time ramping up white-knuckle tension as Bramble, with the help of Mouche and Farid, seeks to uncover how Rommel is able to secretly access fuel and other supplies so quickly out in the middle of the desert. Elements of maudlin and familiar wartime woes creep into the plot from time to time, but Wilder and Brackett coyly acknowledge their disdain for sentimentality when Rommel quips, “A familiar scene, reminiscent of bad melodrama,” after Mouche pleads with him to save her brother who has been taken captive by the Germans. In lieu of directly depicting Nazi depravity, moments like this exemplify Wilder’s tendency to deploy his acerbic wit as a means of attacking fascism at its ideological core.

Throughout, the film intriguingly airs the notion that war necessitates deception, which is evident in everything from Bramble’s masquerading as Davos to multiple outwardly amiable interactions between the Allied and Axis forces. There’s more than a hint of Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion here, but the gentlemanly displays of respect in Five Graves to Cairo are secretly laced with poison, and the filmmakers are particularly attentive to the subtle manipulations and duplicity that every character engages in.

Though Wilder resists the more saccharine and idealistic leanings of wartime propaganda, Five Graves to Cairo isn’t immune to them in the end. His celebration of the importance of fighting for the greater, rather than individual, good is laudable, which makes it all the more unfortunate that this stretch of the film feels so hopelessly tacked on, implementing on-screen text and generic wartime montages before returning to one final scene where Wilder uncharacteristically tugs hard at the heartstrings. It’s certainly not as egregiously jingoistic as many other Hollywood films made during the war years, but it’s a disruptive tonal and stylistic shift that mars what’s otherwise a taut, and often sharp, wartime thriller.

Image/Sound

Sourced from a brand new 4K master, newer even then the one used for Eureka’s recent release, Kino’s transfer is simply stunning, with a consistently sharp, richly detailed image that’s free of all signs of debris. Ample and evenly distributed grain helps preserve the original film-like texture of the 35mm print, while the high contrast ratio produces inky blacks and an impressive range of grays, which go a long way to highlighting John F. Seitz’s moody cinematography. The DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is well balanced, capturing the full depth of Miklós Rózsa’s rousing score and sporting perfectly clean dialogue.

Extras

Film historian Joseph McBride’s audio commentary is the only extra feature here. He provides a fairly comprehensive reading of the film and Wilder’s career, including how the death of the director’s mother during the Holocaust colored his representation of World War II in Five Graves to Cairo. Of particular interest is McBride’s focus on the multiculturalism in much of Wilder’s work, and how his recurring fascination with deception stemmed in part from his need to blend in as a European exile in Hollywood. Ample time is also spent covering Wilder’s work under both Mitchell Leisen and Ernst Lubitsch, which helped to develop his skill at melding comedy and drama. McBride also makes a compelling case in challenging Wilder’s reputation as a misogynist and digresses into a humorous and lengthy dragging of Bosley Crowther, whose 1943 review of Five Graves to Cairo for New York Times he uses to highlight the critical misunderstanding of the film when it was first released.

Overall

Kino’s release Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo boasts a gorgeous transfer and an illuminating audio commentary track by Joseph McBride.