Old Movie Review: "Five Graves to Cairo"

In my quest to see as many Billy Wilder movies as I can, yesterday I watched "Five Graves to Cairo" (1943).  The movie starred Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, and Erich von Stroheim.  Wilder wrote the screenplay with his frequent writing partner Charles Brackett, and it was only the second movie that he directed.

This is a World War II movie, but it takes place in a small space - a small hotel in an Egyptian desert oasis.  Tone is a shell-shocked British soldier who stumbles upon the place just before  the German tank troops, including Field Marshall Erwin Rommel himself, arrive to rest up before rolling on to conquer Cairo in the North African campaign.  Tone then goes "undercover" with the help of chambermaid Baxter in an effort to thwart the Nazis.  Of course, history tells us that that is indeed what happened, and this tense little drama offers an interesting speculation as to exactly how the Allies performed that task.  Fiction it may be, but fun and exciting fiction to be sure.

History and the movies have cast Rommel as a sort of "noble soldier", a brilliant military tactician, who just so happened to be doing his duty in service of the Wrong Side.  Not so in this movie.  Oh, Rommel is still the brilliant tactician, but noble...not so much.  As played by von Stroheim, he is an evil Nazi through-and-through, and he, von Stroheim, steals the movie.

As I mentioned, this was the second movie that Wilder directed.  A year after "Five Graves to Cairo", Wilder broke out big time with the terrific "Double Indemnity", and the roster of terrific Wilder hits continued to grow and grow from there.  Seven years later in 1950, Wilder and Brackett wrote and Wilder directed the classic "Sunset Boulevard".  In that movie, Wilder once again cast Erich von Stroheim as Max, the faithful butler to Norma Desmond.  In fact, von Stroheim was one of the great directors of the silent movie era, but is in the roll of Max von Meyerling that he is most remembered.

In the great body of work that Wilder produced, a movie like "Five Graves to Cairo" is easily overlooked, which is too bad.  It is one that movie lovers should make a point of seeing.  Be assured that it will be on my "DVR Alert" list when next it turns up on Turner Classic Movies.

"Sunset Boulevard", the Musical

You always worry when one of your favorite books/movies/plays is transferred to another art form:  book to movie, play to movie, or, in this case, Classic Movie to Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical Extravaganza.  


The 1950 Billy Wilder movie, "Sunset Boulevard", is by almost any source you care to sight, considered one of the Top Ten movies ever made in America.  It is the story of an aging silent screen movie star, Norma Desmond, who has been pushed to the Hollywood scrap heap with the advent of talking motion pictures, who meets up with down-on-his-luck cynical screenwriter Joe Gillis.  How the two meet, interact, and use each other makes for one of the most compelling movies you'll ever see.  The movie starred Gloria Swanson and the incomparable William Holden, and the thought of someone tampering with such a classic could seem almost sacrilegious.


However, Andrew Lloyd Webber provided the music and brought his story to the London and Broadway stages back in the early 1990's.  The musical was highly acclaimed and even Billy Wilder was pleased with it ("I think it would make a pretty good movie", he said), so seeing it has long been on my bucket list.


Anyway, the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera brought "Sunset Boulevard" to town this week at the Benedum, and we took it in yesterday.  We both liked it.  The show starred a Broadway actress named Liz Callaway as Norma, and  Matthew Scott (who looks a lot like Pirate Neil Walker) as Joe.  Joe is the character who holds the play together, he is in almost every scene, but it is Norma who draws all the attention, and the numerous dazzling costume changes almost every time she is on stage is just the least of the attraction.  Norma also has the two show stopping musical numbers, "As If We Never Said Good-bye" and "With One Look".


The show is true to the movie, and while there is very little spoken dialog, what there is taken almost directly from the movie, including it's two most famous lines:

• "I am big.  It's the pictures that got small."
• "are you ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille?"

Very good show, well staged by the CLO, and all of the actors.  It made for a great day at the theater.

However, one should never forget the source material, the great 1950 movie by the great Billy Wilder.  If you've never seen it, and you love movies, then make it a point to see it very soon.