By and large, Wilder and Brackett’s negotiations with the studio brass over production plans went fairly smoothly. They agreed to shoot the location scenes in the desert near the Camp Young army base, eighteen miles outside Yuma, Arizona, and at Salton Sea, near Indio, California, at the southern end of the Mojave Desert. The studio did, however, object repeatedly to the title, Five Graves to Cairo, and made several alternate suggestions, such as “Rommel’s Last Stand.” One executive disliked the word graves in the title, since it had morose connotations. Why not simply call the movie “Five to Cairo”? Brackett and Wilder passed over this suggestion in silence. One member of their production unit at the time said that there was no use in disputing with Brackett and Wilder once they made up their minds about an issue: “They were like solid iron and quicksilver.”19
Brackett and Wilder set the film in 1942, right after Rommel, a born tank commander, has driven the British from Tobruk on June 21. As the story develops, Rommel uses the faded Empress of Britain Hotel in the village of Sidi Halfaya as his temporary headquarters. This is where most of the action takes place. Brackett and Wilder completed the first draft of the screenplay in October 1942, but they kept revising it, in keeping with the press reports of the African campaign. Wilder liked to boast that the screenplay was torn from the headlines. The screenplay was so up-to-the-minute that the final shooting script, dated December 17, 1942, contained a reference near the end to the decisive defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps by British general Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army at El Alamein in November 1942, when Rommel’s men and machines were worn out. That spelled the beginning of the end of the German resistance in North Africa.20
Wilder noted that the finished screenplay ran a mere 120 pages, which would make a film of less than one hundred minutes. Screenplays had to be economical, he explained, in order not to bore the audience with scenes that go on too long.
Wilder had learned early in the game that one way of placing his personal stamp on the films he directed was to assemble a production crew that went from picture to picture with him. His team of regulars by this time included screenwriter-producer Charles Brackett, editor Doane Harrison, and assistant director Charles Coleman, all of whom he had worked with before. On Five Graves to Cairo, he added, among others, cinematographer John Seitz, whom he would call on often throughout the next decade. Seitz was an experienced director of photography whose career dated back to the silent days, when he photographed Rex Ingram’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), Rudolph Valentino’s career-making movie. These creative collaborators could almost intuit what Wilder wanted from each of them as the shooting period progressed.
In casting Five Graves to Cairo, Wilder chose Franchot Tone (Three Comrades), a competent actor but a star of the second magnitude. For the role of Mouche, the French maid, Wilder picked twenty-year-old Anne Baxter, who had made a name for herself the previous year in Orson Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons. Akim Tamiroff (The Great McGinty), a reliable character actor, was tagged for Farid, the oily Egyptian proprietor of the Empress of Britain Hotel; he specialized in playing unsavory foreigners with heavy accents.
For the movie’s drawing card, Wilder was banking on Erich von Stroheim in the role of Rommel. After Stroheim’s career as a director foundered with the coming of sound, he had devoted himself to character parts, usually villains. He was familiar to audiences. Wilder had admired Stroheim as both an actor and a director from his youth. When Wilder was still a struggling young writer in Berlin, in April 1929, he contributed a profile of Stroheim to the journal Der Querschnitt (The cross section). Wilder extolled Stroheim for writing, directing, and starring in Hollywood films like The Wedding March (1926), in which he frankly portrayed the debauchery of the decadent Austrian aristocracy prior to World War I; the picture was thought shocking at the time. Referring to Stroheim’s reputation for playing nasty villains, Wilder titled the Der Querschnitt article “Stroheim, der Mann den man gern hasst” (Stroheim, the man you love to hate). Stroheim earned that epithet in The Heart of Humanity (1919), when he played a German officer who has invaded an enemy village; the brute picks up a wailing infant and throws it out the window. The moniker had subsequently been used in ad campaigns for films in which he appeared.21 He continued to play stiff-necked, inflexible Prussian types in both American and European films, including, most famously, the monocled commandant of a German prisoner-of-war camp in Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937).
When Wilder returned to his office at the studio one afternoon early in production, he was informed that Stroheim, who was working in Hollywood during the war, had arrived and was over at the Western Costume Company on Vermont Avenue, trying on uniforms. Arthur Lennig, author of the definitive biography of Stroheim, recounts that Wilder rushed over to the store and found Stroheim. “I clicked my heels, introduced myself, and said, ‘This is a very big moment in my life: that little Wilder . . . should now be directing the great Stroheim.’ ” Stroheim did not answer, so Wilder added, “to make him feel good,” a reference to the classic films Stroheim had directed. “Your problem, I guess, was that you were ten years ahead of your time.” Stroheim stared at Wilder with a vulpine look and barked, “Twenty, Mr. Wilder; twenty!” Wilder concluded, “He possessed grandeur. Even his mistakes were grandiose; and when he succeeded he had real class.”22
Characteristically, Stroheim made sure that his contract with Paramount for Five Graves to Cairo stipulated that he could personally supervise his costumes. He was a firm believer in utilizing “costume and decor to define the personality within.”23 Stroheim had carefully examined newspaper photos of Rommel, and he told Wilder during their meeting at Western Costume that he must have genuine German field glasses and an authentic German-made Leica camera slung around his neck. The camera, he emphasized, must be loaded with unexposed film. Wilder tactfully inquired who would know whether the camera had film in it. Stroheim replied that an audience would sense that the camera had no film inside it and that it was merely a prop. Besides, he added, “I will know!”24
Although principal photography would not go into full swing until January 1943, Wilder aimed to get some of the desert exteriors in the can ahead of time. In the film’s opening scene, John Bramble (Franchot Tone), a survivor of the fall of Tobruk, climbs out of a British tank that is rumbling across the desert sands. He crawls toward the oasis hotel in the nearby village of Sidi Halfaya. Wilder was acutely aware that the first scene in a picture was crucial. Some people might walk out on a picture in the first few minutes, he explained. “You have to have something arresting, telling them what they’re going to see.”25
On Tuesday, November 3, 1942, Wilder boarded the Sunset Limited for the train trip from Los Angeles to Yuma, Arizona, the town closest to the desert location. He was accompanied by Seitz, Harrison, and Coleman. Tone was scheduled to arrive on Thursday, November 5. Wilder and Brackett, who had studied news photos of the Libyan desert in planning the film, thought the Arizona sand dunes an ideal approximation of the Sahara desert.
Wilder spent two days with his skeleton crew lining up shots for the opening scene. He rose at four o’clock on Thursday morning and proceeded to the desert location for a last-minute check. He was chagrined to discover tire tracks all over the sand dunes where he planned to shoot the opening scene. Some GI from Camp Young had taken a joyride in his jeep all over the area the afternoon before. The script, of course, called for a clean, untrammeled expanse of desert sand. Wilder was determined to surmount this unforeseen obstacle. When the film unit arrived, he immediately ordered the production assistants to make a foray into Yuma and obtain every broom they could buy when the stores opened. When they returned, Wilder pressed the whole unit into service, industriously sweeping away the tire tracks. Wilder himself, Tone, the camera crew, and some volunteer citizens from Yuma all joined in. “We cleaned up every goddamned tire track,” he said; “I shot the scene, and it was perfect.”26
Principal photography got under way in earnest in early J
anuary 1943. Interiors were filmed on the soundstages at Paramount, with exteriors filmed at Salton Sea. It was there that the replica of the oasis hotel, the Empress of Britain, was erected; it was situated in the village of Sidi Halfaya, whose main street had also been built. British Major David Lloyd, a veteran of the tank warfare in the Libyan desert, was on hand as a technical adviser.
“By the time of shooting we generally had a pretty good idea of the mood we wanted,” John Seitz remembered. “There was a lot of night work” on Five Graves, “and we just kept that style throughout.”27 Seitz became renowned for his use of low-key lighting on Wilder’s films. In the present film, he helped to establish the menacing atmosphere of the Empress of Britain Hotel, which is occupied by the Germans, by throwing a dim, lowkey light on the set. He thereby summoned up night-shrouded rooms and ominous corridors. For example, in the scene in which Bramble encounters a Nazi officer in a shadowy room and kills him, the only visible light source is Bramble’s flashlight. Seitz had to make the illumination in the dark room seem to be coming solely from the flashlight, and he created a dark, sinister atmosphere for the murder in the bargain.
Stroheim was a short man, but Wilder made him an imposing figure from the first moment his image flashes on the screen. We first see Rommel from the back and from above, as he strides back and forth in the hotel lobby, dictating a message to the führer. He first dictates the memo in German, then repeats it in English, he explains, “to save the British the trouble of translation when they intercept it.” Fresh from his victory at Tobruk, Rommel declares, “Nothing can save the British Eighth Army from a colossal catastrophe. They say the Red Sea once opened by special arrangement with Moses. A similar mishap will not occur this time.”
At this point Wilder’s camera moves in for a close-up of “the back of Stroheim’s neck, damp with sweat,” Lennig writes. “Only at the end of the speech does he turn, so we can see his face. What a striking and dramatic introduction” for the Desert Fox. When one of the other actors asked Stroheim why he delivered this speech rather slowly and deliberately, he answered, “To be on-screen a little longer.” Wilder later commented, “Standing with his stiff, fat neck in the foreground, he could express with his face more than almost any other actor.”28
It was common in American films at the time to have foreigners speak English with a foreign accent, even when they were addressing each other, instead of speaking their own language. In the course of this picture, however, Wilder has Stroheim as Rommel bark orders at his subordinates in German lines that are not subtitled. That makes Rommel seem all the more threatening to Bramble and Mouche, since they are ignorant of his plans.
Wilder portrayed the Nazis in the film as civilized individuals who have gone terribly astray, not as uncivilized brutes. By the same token, Stroheim and Wilder agreed that he should not play Rommel as the sort of vicious Hun that had been Stroheim’s stock-in-trade in other films over the years. Two decades later, I asked Kurt Richter, a veteran of the Afrika Korps, what he thought of Stroheim’s portrayal of Rommel. He responded, “Stroheim rightly gave Field Marshal Rommel a dignified, even gentlemanly demeanor. After all, Rommel was a quintessential professional soldier, respected even by his enemies.”29
Doane Harrison did the first edit at a good clip, since he and Wilder had, as usual, mapped out the editing plan during filming. Wilder hoped to get composer Franz Waxman, but Waxman had a contract with Warner Bros. and could not moonlight at Paramount. Hence Wilder chose Miklos Rozsa (The Thief of Bagdad), who, like Lajos Biró, was a native of Hungary. Rozsa composed a score filled with driving rhythms, jolting chords, and some discordant passages. Wilder was pleased with what he heard, but Louis Lipstone, the head of the music department at Paramount, was not. Lipstone called Wilder and Rozsa to his office and asked Rozsa to make the music more pleasant by eliminating the dissonant passages. Wilder bristled; he told Lipstone that he was a second-rate musician who had begun his musical career sawing on a fiddle in a cheap bistro. He therefore advised Lipstone “to leave the composing to the real composer.”30 Wilder saved Rozsa’s score, but his overbearing manner made some enemies in the front office. At any rate, the postproduction was finished, and the film was shipped to the New York office of Paramount in April. The movie was released in May.
The opening credits of Five Graves to Cairo are impressive. They appear on the screen in typescript, as if the story that is about to unfold has been taken from the official files of the War Department. In the sequence that follows, a phantom tank lumbers across the sand dunes of the Sahara desert. Inside, the corpses of the crew are slumped over, except for one soldier who is still alive. Half-conscious, he climbs out of the tank’s open hatch and is pitched onto the ground as the tank lurches forward. Wilder’s camera tracks in on the soldier as he lies prostrate on the scalding sand; the camera pauses in close-up on the dog tags on the soldier’s chest: “J. J. Bramble.” He is the solitary survivor of a British tank crew that has been cut off from the rest of the army during the retreat from Tobruk. The delirious Corporal John Bramble, suffering from sunstroke, drags himself across the blazing desert toward the outpost of Sidi Halfaya. He staggers into the ramshackle Empress of Britain Hotel and collapses in the lobby. Wilder demonstrates his penchant for visual storytelling in this virtually wordless opening sequence.
Bramble is revived by Farid, the hostelry’s Egyptian proprietor, and Mouche, the French chambermaid. He learns that the British regiment detachment that had been billeted in the hotel has departed and that Rommel, along with his staff, will arrive soon and take over the hotel as his temporary headquarters. The obsequious Farid hastily hauls down the Union Jack and hoists the Nazi flag with its swastika in its place. He later places a veil over the portrait of Queen Victoria, in whose honor the hotel is named.
When Rommel and his entourage arrive, Mouche applies lipstick and primps before a mirror to make herself look attractive to the German officers. She hopes to employ her feminine wiles to coax Rommel or one of his aides to arrange for the release of her wounded brother from a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp.
Bramble finds out that Paul Davos, an Alsatian hotel waiter, has been killed in an air raid and lies buried beneath the rubble of a bomb explosion in the cellar. Bramble assumes Davos’s identity to spy on the Nazis and promptly commandeers Davos’s uniform. Since Davos had a club foot, Bramble must from now on hobble about as if he were lame. Thus in Wilder’s second film, as in his first, a character assumes a disguise to deceive others.
Bramble finds out from Lieutenant Schwegler (Peter van Eyck), Rommel’s adjutant, that Davos was an espionage agent spying on the British for Rommel. Hence Bramble finds himself in the unenviable position of a double agent; he must manufacture information about the British battle plans that will sound plausible to Rommel while attempting to get Rommel to divulge military secrets that he can relay to the British general headquarters in Cairo.
Mouche takes Rommel’s breakfast tray to him the next morning so she can broach the question of her brother’s plight to him. Expecting a male servant, Rommel, who has his breakfast in bed, says it is inappropriate for a female to approach him at this hour in his bedroom. As Mouche leans forward to hand him his tray, he snaps, “Two steps back.” When she presents her petition about her brother to him, he launches into a sardonic speech that Stroheim delivers masterfully. “You are suggesting some kind of bargain,” he begins, implying that she plans to repay him for her brother’s release with sexual favors. “This is a familiar scene, reminiscent of bad melodrama. Although usually it is not the brother for whose life the heroine comes to plead; it is the lover. The time is midnight; the place, the tent of the conquering general. Blushingly the lady makes her proposal and gallantly the general grants her wish. Later the lady very stupidly takes poison.” He concludes by informing her that such requests must be made through the Red Cross or the Quakers—in triplicate. Then he dismisses her.
In a later sequence, captured British officers are brought to the deser
t inn to have lunch with Rommel. He gloats over his victories while giving them a lecture on military strategy as he maneuvers saltcellars and pepper shakers around on the tablecloth. Bramble, in his role as a waiter, places a whiskey decanter in front of Colonel Fitzhume (Miles Mander). Wilder’s camera moves in for a close-up of the bottle to show the viewer that Bramble has draped his dog tags around the bottle. In this manner Bramble adroitly reveals to Fitzhume that he is a British soldier. Wilder even mines some humor from this interchange. When another officer notices the dog tags on the bottle, he assumes that Bramble is the brand name of a whiskey he has not heard of. Unruffled, Bramble replies that it is a choice brand that Rommel saves for special occasions.
During his lecture to the British officers, Rommel refers to the mysterious five graves to Cairo. He firmly refuses to give away the answer to the riddle but adds, “After I’ve taken Cairo, I will send a postcard to number 10 Downing Street with the correct solution.” At the end of the luncheon, Fitzhume surreptitiously tells Bramble to uncover the secret surrounding the five graves, which Rommel says is the key to his success in the desert campaign.
In the course of ransacking the hotel for some clue to the puzzle, Bramble discovers a telltale newspaper clipping in a desk drawer. Dated February 17, 1937, it concerns a German archaeologist named Cromstaetter who led an expedition to Egypt before the war to explore ancient tombs. The photo accompanying the article reveals that the so-called archaeologist is really Rommel. He was scouting strategic sites for supply depots in the desert—in anticipation of the African campaign. Bramble ultimately figures out that the five graves are actually five plots of ground between Tobruk and Cairo in which ammunition and other supplies are buried. The exact locations can be identified on Rommel’s map of Egypt, since each of the five letters on the map that spell out Egypt marks the site of a supply dump.
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