OVP: Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Film: Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Stars: Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Tamiroff, Erich von Stroheim, Peter van Eyck

Director: Billy Wilder

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Art Direction, Cinematography, & Film Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Anne Baxter-click here to learn more about Ms. Baxter (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are not going to move too far into the future of Anne Baxter's career this week, though we are going to move to a different studio momentarily.  Last week we took a look at Baxter's career in 1942, when she graduated from teenager to adult onscreen with both The Pied Piper and The Magnificent Ambersons.  Baxter, though, as a leading woman during this era seems to struggle in terms of finding films that were the correct fit for her (and one could argue, as we move further into the years, that this was the case her whole career).  We'll talk more about this in a second, but at this point Baxter was cranking out a lot of "love interest" roles, and the best-remembered of the bunch was Five Graves to Cairo, which she did for Paramount rather than her typical studio of Fox.  The film, like last week's, is another World War II drama filmed within the confines of the war (this was actually a pretty common typecasting for Baxter-she found a lot of success in the early 1940's as a woman in war movies), focusing on a fictionalized story about the campaign in North Africa.

(Spoilers Ahead) In the opening sequence, John Bramble (Tone) wanders, dumbstruck, out of the desert into a hotel owned by Farid (Tamiroff), with the help of Mouche (Baxter), a French maid.  Once Bramble comes to, he has to pretend to be a dead waiter that they have buried in the basement, as the Germans have come to stay at the hotel & the only way he'll survive is by pretending not to be British.  The Germans include Field Marshall Erwin Rommal (von Stroheim), at the time of this filming the most famous military leader in the Third Reich, who develops a rapport with Bramble, and through this rapport Bramble figures out how Rommal is planning on campaigning through North Africa with limited supplies (by using the letters on the map that spell "Egypt" as secret supply dumps, hence the "Five Graves of Cairo").  Bramble escapes, but while he's trying to leave one of Rommal's aides, Lieutenant Schwegler (van Eyck) catches that he's the dead waiter, and he has to kill him.  Mouche briefly takes the blame for the death, though, so that Bramble can escape & help stop Rommal in his tracks, helping the war effort.  This costs her her life, which Bramble realizes when he goes back for her, and puts a parasol, something she'd long-desired, to place over her grave.

I talked about this last week, but I find war films filmed during a war, specifically World War II, fascinating because it wasn't crystal clear who was going to win.  During filming (which, if the internet is correct, was a few weeks in January & February), Rommal was still in charge of the campaign in North Africa (the Battle of Medenine would be waged after production but before this film came out), and so was a formidable opponent, albeit one who was losing the tide of the war.  This makes the Rommal character in Five Graves to Cairo the most interesting figure in an otherwise underwhelming movie.  Von Stroheim is quite good as the military commander, playing him as a figure more focused on flexing his own intellectual prowess than caring about the politics of his decisions (mirroring historians' problematic trouble with this particular leader, who would eventually commit suicide as a result of a coup attempt against Hitler).  The rest of the film struggles to match him, though, particularly with Tone as kind of a blank canvass performance in the lead (he's very handsome, but nothing else about his performances really sing with me, even his Oscar-cited work in Mutiny on the Bounty was just okay).  The movie also doesn't really know what to do with its domestic trappings.

The film won three Oscar nominations, two of which I enjoyed: the art direction & the cinematography.  The film's hotel setting is full of some fun detailing (I love not only the rubble-drenched basement with a body under it, though there's not enough comic maneuvering with this particular situation for my taste), as it does look like an abandoned hotel in the middle of the desert that might otherwise be left for the elements.  The cinematography is great in the opening sequence, where there's a cool shot of a tank meandering through the desert with a bunch of corpses on it (I initially thought we were going to get a much less conventional film), and the film is well-lit (but more conventional) as the movie continues.  Every actor has a moonlight-drenched face, and this works well with a comely pair of leading performers.  As I mentioned above, though, the film is juggling too many narratives without enough focus, which is basically the definition of rough editing, so I'm not cosigning with the Academy in that regard.

Don't think I forgot about our star.  I once remember someone saying that Philip Seymour Hoffman was a "movie star in a character actor's body," but with Baxter, a few films in, it's kind of the reverse-she was conventionally a quite attractive woman, but her performances all ring like they're supposed to be invisible, fitting into the confines of the script through solid character acting.  She doesn't know how to centralize a misguided attempt at a love story (particularly one where we're supposed to assume she's willing to sleep with Lt. Schwegler to help her imprisoned brother in France, something the Hays Code isn't going to condone). As a result, this is a case where Baxter feels miscast.  Next week we're going to move further into the decade, past the end of the war, and into a genre that I am genuinely excited to see what Baxter does with it as it feels completely outside of her expectations, or really of what we'd expect of most actresses of the era: a fantasy film.