by Ed Sikov
But in June, Rommel’s imminent triumph began to fade under the onslaught of American and British fighter planes. At the end of August, Rommel launched a last offensive against El Alamein, but his troops hadn’t the strength they once did. He attempted a full retreat, but Hitler himself ordered the field marshal to hold fast. In the beginning of November, Rommel risked court-martial by disobeying the Führer’s direct order: he withdrew his troops seven hundred miles to a position behind the Libyan port of Benghazi. This retreat marked the Allies’ most decisive victory in the war to date.
Brackett and Wilder continued writing Five Graves to Cairo in September and October 1942 in an increasing state of confidence. The news was rosy. The war in North Africa was going their way, and so was the box office return on The Major and the Minor. On October 19, the Hollywood Reporter noted that The Major and the Minor, which had already been running for five successful weeks in New York, had cracked the opening-night box office records at the Paramount theaters in both Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. The film’s first-day receipts were also quite high, running at the same levels as the previous first-day record holder—Wake Island, Paramount’s ripped-from-the-headlines combat film about American Marines’ heroic but ultimately catastrophic attempt to hold a single island in the Pacific. Wake Island’s success clearly did not depend upon a happy ending; every American soldier dies in the end as the island is overrun by the murderous Japanese. Apparently, homefront audiences wanted to get a closer view of the battles they read about in the newspapers, even if they ended badly. A 1942 poll found that the two favorite movies in the country were Mrs. Miniver, William Wyler’s melodrama about a British woman (Greer Garson) who holds down the homefront against the war’s severity, and Wake Island. It was a most opportune time for a drama about the war in North Africa. Five Graves to Cairo was set to become another Wake Island, only this time the Allies would win.
On Tuesday, November 3, 1942, while Field Marshal Rommel was still in the act of retreating from his positions in the sands of North Africa, Billy Wilder took the 9:45 Sunset Limited from Los Angeles to Yuma, Arizona, the closest town to where the first location shooting for Five Graves to Cairo was scheduled to commence later that week. He’d gone to Yuma with Judith to get married; now he was going there to film a war. He was accompanied by Doane Harrison and Buddy Coleman. Billy’s star, Franchot Tone, followed on Thursday. Brackett and Wilder had wanted Cary Grant, but Grant told them that Paramount Pictures simply didn’t have enough money to make him spend a month in the desert, so Tone ended up with the role. He was an ingratiating, everyday sort of star—handsome, well spoken, a little bland perhaps, but not without a certain charm.
The location itself was eighteen miles out of Yuma on the Yuma-El Centro Highway. Paramount’s advance men had already arranged for the cooperation of nearby Camp Young, and in fact Paramount succeeded in borrowing a tank from the army. In an attempt to be authentic, Brackett and Wilder had urged Paramount to get them a genuine English tank of exactly the type used in the battles of North Africa, but the cost of transporting such a behemoth out to the middle of nowhere proved to be excessive. They would have to make do with an American General Grant M3 tank instead. In the planning of their own combat sequences, Brackett and Wilder did use photographs of the actual and very recent battles between the British Eighth Army and Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The machinery of Hollywood studio filmmaking facilitated them greatly in this regard, since Paramount had an entire research department to find and check precisely that sort of detail.
The company was called to the dunes outside of Yuma at 6:30 A.M. on November 5 so that Billy could line up and rehearse his desert troops. Billy himself got up around 4:00 A.M. and went out to get an early look at the beautiful set of wavy, windswept sand dunes he’d picked. To his horror, he saw nothing but tire tracks. Evidently Camp Young had jeeps and the jeeps had drivers. This was not an insurmountable problem for Billy, who sent some gofers into Yuma to procure as many brooms as they could find once the stores opened. When they returned, Wilder put everyone to work sweeping the desert, and once the shifting sands were smooth enough to satisfy him, he began shooting the opening shots of Five Graves to Cairo.
John Seitz shot a mere ninety feet of celluloid when the borrowed General Grant M3 tank broke down, instantly pushing the film a whole day behind schedule. Even with this delay, though, the sand dunes sequences were in the can by the end of the day on November 8, and the company traveled back to Los Angeles.
Paramount, meanwhile, was already preparing a second location—one that was much more extensive than Yuma’s sand dunes. Most of the action of Five Graves to Cairo takes place in the dusty Egyptian village of Sidi Halfaya, so Paramount built a replica near Indio, California, on the shores of the Salton Sea. Once again, a sense of authenticity prevailed. The set took several months to construct. Workers dug adobe from nearby hills and hauled it to the site, where it was mixed with water and straw to form bricks—forty thousand of them. The script required a working highway, so Paramount built one—by laying a solid foundation and then covering it with tons of raw clay. Major David P. J. Lloyd, MC, of the British Army Staff, A.F.V. Branch, was flown in to be a technical advisor; Lloyd had had firsthand experience of desert tank warfare in Libya. Brackett himself managed to locate a collector of enemy military uniforms and convinced him to loan one to Paramount’s wardrobe department for reproduction. A total of 1,200 uniforms were made for the film. As for Franchot Tone, the star obligingly wore a specially built shoe with a four-inch-thick sole and a weight of five pounds (to force a drastic limp). Tone was only allowed to wear the shoe for fifteen minutes every hour because of the strain it caused. Clearly, Billy wanted to get every detail right.
Wilder’s sense of authenticity included language, but perhaps needless to say, he was working under the constraints of mandated, institutional censorship, and thus found it necessary to write combat dialogue that would be equally acceptable in a particularly repressed kindergarten. One choice line stuck in the censors’ communal craw: it had to do with a stick and a smell. The phrasing took various forms, but the censor Joseph Breen never found it funny and repeatedly objected to its inclusion. Wilder refused to back down. In the finished film, the line is uttered by the buffoonish Italian general, Sebastiano (Fortunio Bonanova): “As we say in Milano, we are getting the end of the stick that stinks!” When Brackett and Wilder proposed that a dead German officer be discovered in the chambermaid’s bed, it was quite a bit too much for Breen, who forbade it. The writers solved the problem by keeping the corpse in her bedroom but hiding its precise disposition; as a line of dialogue puts it, the body is simply found “in a very particular spot.”
The production of Five Graves to Cairo reopened the first week of January, alternating between the Saltón Sea location and Paramount’s own soundstages. Erich von Stroheim arrived to play Rommel. Stroheim had been appearing onstage in New York in Arsenic and Old Lace, but it was hardly difficult for him to assume a more military role. Stroheim was martial by nature. He was, after all, the supremely autocratic film director who, for his 1922 film Foolish Wives, demanded that Universal reconstruct the heart of Monte Carlo more or less to scale on the backlot, and when the studio’s landlocked nature became a problem, Stroheim insisted that huge villas and palaces be constructed at a remote cliff near Monterey. When filming The Merry Widow, Stroheim halted production in a rage one day when he noticed that the blanket used by the protagonist’s dog had been tied with strings instead of the requisite leather straps. It is thus of little surprise to learn that Stroheim’s contract with Paramount included the right to supervise the design of every costume he would wear in Five Graves to Cairo. Stroheim also received $30,000 for his appearance.
The moment Stroheim and Wilder met must have been electric, at least for Billy, since it hadn’t really been all that long ago that an impressionable if sardonic young Berlin journalist had written “Stroheim, der Mann den man gern hasst” (“Stroheim, the Man You Lo
ve to Hate”) for Der Querschnitt. In the meantime, Stroheim’s directing career had all but dried up, while the journalist had become a director swinging a riding crop of his own. “It’s especially Stroheim who, in my youth, struck me,” Wilder once said. “My ideal, if the mix is possible, would be Lubitsch plus Stroheim.” In other words, it would combine elegant wit and hard, photographic realism in equal measure—with a beautiful, well-wrought screenplay and a camera that doesn’t turn away from something ugly. Billy told Stroheim on the day they met that Stroheim was always ten years ahead of his time. Stroheim corrected him: “Twenty, Mr. Wilder, twenty.”
According to Billy, he and Stroheim spent their time together talking about food, women, and Stroheim’s sexual fetishes. Billy, of course, was Stroheim’s ideal audience: “In regard to sex perversions, Mr. von Stroheim was not only twenty years ahead of his time—he was fifty years ahead of his time.”
Wilder set up a number of purely formal problems to be solved while filming. In Five Graves to Cairo, as elsewhere, they always served the film at hand, but these cinematic puzzles also functioned like elements in a chess game or a round of bridge. They kept things interesting. Faced with a technical problem, Billy could never be bored. With Five Graves to Cairo, for instance, the set for the shabby seaside hotel was constructed with twelve four-walled rooms. The usual procedure would have been to build open, three-walled sets to make it easier to shoot, but to Billy, such convenience would also have conveyed, however subtly, a sense of built-in fakery. According to John Seitz, the cramped hotel set was one of the most shootable he ever worked with.
Knowing that Seitz wasn’t afraid of taking chances, Billy trusted his cinematographer to come up with his own innovative ways of filming a given sequence, even (or perhaps particularly) if nobody else had ever done it before. Seitz was a master at his craft. He had been shooting films since 1917. His credits included The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) for Rex Ingram and, more recently, Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels. Five Graves to Cairo is one of Seitz’s finest achievements, but Seitz generously gave much of the credit for the inventiveness of his own cinematography to Wilder. In consultation with Seitz before production began, Wilder insisted that the film actually look hot, so for the outdoors sequences Seitz employed reflectors, black velvet, and natural lighting to achieve a shimmery, overheated effect. Seitz also captured a sense of the cumbersome mobility of tank warfare by lashing a camera to the turret of one tank and using it to follow another as it rolled across the sand.
For the indoor sequences, Seitz used the lowest key lighting possible. (The key light is the main lighting source for a scene; “high key lighting” describes a bright, wide area of intense illumination.) At their absolute brightest, these interior scenes are shadowy and dim, with much of the illumination shining obliquely through innumerable screens and grids. The result is gorgeous but understated, combining the bold visual play of Sternberg’s Morocco with Hawks’s self-effacing restraint. In one shot, the only thing visible on-screen is a round circle of light—a close-up of a flashlight’s beam—while, in pitch darkness, one central character kills another. This is as close as Wilder ever comes to overtly aestheticizing the image, and he does so in this instance knowing that the audience will be too wrapped up in the tension of the fight to notice his art.
The title of the film was still in doubt late into January, when Paramount decided to run a spurious publicity contest to name Billy’s movie for him. William Dozier and other executives picked the following semifinalists: North Africa, Appointment in Africa, Hellfire Pass, Afrika Korps, Africa Aflame, Desert Fury, Beyond the Line of Duty, One Came Back, and Tunisia, the last a particularly witless choice, since the five code letters that serve as the film’s spy-movie subplot spell E-G-Y-P-T. Dozier wrote to Brackett and Wilder on January 20, asking for their views on the matter. They ignored him.
Tom Allen once described Wilder’s hard-edged films lucidly in terms of power relationships: “Wilder’s ability to wear the many masques of this planet’s worldly overlords has been his most pungent contribution to nudging Hollywood away from the dreaming meek.” Billy’s Rommel is a case in point. Because of Stroheim’s harsh magnetism, it’s Rommel, not Franchot Tone’s J. J. Bramble, who drives the film. Bramble is an unlikely war hero, and thus all the more intriguing as far as Wilder is concerned; he used to work as a clerk in the claims department of an insurance company in London, and he becomes a heroic figure only because he is unlucky enough not to have been slaughtered in his tank along with his fellows. But for Billy, perversely, Rommel is a figure of genuine authority and respect. Had Rommel been a successful American general, Billy would likely have found his military prowess dull. As a Nazi, though, he was riveting.
Wilder introduces him in a dramatically high-angle shot, taken from the interior balcony of the desert hotel he has seized as his temporary headquarters. One of the truisms of expressive film language is that high-angle shots, looking down on their subjects, tend to diminish characters (whereas low-angle shots are said to aggrandize them). Here, though, the elevated angle from which Wilder’s camera records Rommel as he paces back and forth, riding crop in hand, only serves to reinforce the Nazi field marshal’s complete control of the space. We see him from Bramble’s perspective—Bramble is crossing the balcony looking down—and he is titanic, a hard, pragmatic force whose bearing and attitude leave no doubt as to his supreme authority. No matter that the real Rommel looked nothing like Erich von Stroheim. As conceived, written, and filmed by Billy, and as performed by Stroheim, the Rommel of Five Graves to Cairo is definitive: a shrewd, charming commander with ice in his veins; a restless man left unsatisfied and bored by others; a powerful man whose contempt for women is unmistakable.
According to Stroheim’s biographer Richard Koszarski, the one-time director imposed his own personal stamp upon his character. Wilder assented. The irritable and demanding Stroheim possessed the sort of ineffable energy that film directors can use to their own advantage, as long as they don’t fight it. With an eye toward the kind of veracity he had attempted to achieve as a filmmaker himself, Stroheim insisted on creating his own makeup design—a rich, weathered tan to the line of his cap and very pale the rest of the way, since Stroheim knew for a fact that Field Marshal Rommel never took his hat off out of doors. According to Koszarski, Stroheim then “ordered a special protective metal grid for the crystal of his wristwatch, something he claimed was always used by the German military. It was handmade for him. He ordered special German binoculars and Zeiss cameras. They were obtained. He ordered film to be put in the cameras, and Billy Wilder was incredulous. ‘Who will know whether the cameras have film in them?’ was Wilder’s question. ‘I will know,’ Stroheim replied.”
Five Graves to Cairo was originally scheduled to be a seven-week shoot, but by the time it closed it was a week over schedule. Its final cost was in the neighborhood of $855,000, about $30,000 more than had been budgeted. (Billy earned $31,500 for cowriting the film and $21,000 for directing it.)
Wilder was especially concerned about the film’s musical score. He wanted his old friend Franz Wachsmann—now Waxman—to write it, but Waxman was then under contract to Warner Bros. Favoring the sort of dark, richly orchestral scores that European émigré composers were known for by the early 1940s, Wilder interviewed another refugee, Miklós Rózsa. Indeed, one of the first blunt things Billy told Rózsa when they met was that he’d really wanted Waxman. But, Billy went on, if Rózsa did a good job with Five Graves to Cairo, he would be first in line to score Wilder’s next movie. Wilder clearly took another lesson from Sturges—namely that a director’s work was greatly facilitated when a team of trusted associates accompanied him from one project to the next. Rózsa’s recollection of his first meeting with Wilder and Brackett echoes everyone else who knew them: “The volatile Wilder was all jokes and wit and couldn’t sit still for a moment. They were like solid iron and quicksilver.”
The score Rózsa composed was tense, te
xtured, and dissonant; Billy loved it. But Paramount’s executive musical director, Louis R. Lipstone, found it offensive, and he tried to get Rózsa to rewrite it—specifically, to remove the invidious discordance and make it sound nicer. A heated argument erupted. Wilder quickly came to Rózsa’s aid and bluntly told Lipstone that he was a two-bit vulgarian. According to Rózsa, Wilder asked Lipstone to kindly remember that he was no longer in the Kaffehaus where he used to play his fiddle, he should leave the composing to the real composer, and he had better just go back to his office and stay there. Rózsa found the whole tirade most helpful and amusing. (Billy was wrong, however; Lipstone didn’t begin his career in a Kaffeehaus but rather a chop suey joint.)
If Five Graves to Cairo doesn’t reach the heights of Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, Avanti!, or Wilder’s other masterpieces, it nonetheless remains a finely crafted film, one that deserves a higher rank than history has awarded it. The stark beauty of its opening sequence is especially impressive. Under the credits is a shot of mountainous sand dunes receding into infinity. A tank appears in the far distance on the right of the screen and slowly moves diagonally toward the camera. A dissolve after Billy’s director credit brings us to a closer shot, one that sets a more precise tone: a dead body hangs out of the tank’s turret, its head thrown grotesquely back, one of its arms hanging lifeless to the side. The camera stares for a moment before another dissolve leads to a still closer shot of the corpse, its eyes fixed and open and pointing to the sky in a death stare. At this point Wilder cuts to a shot of the dead man’s feet swinging helplessly inside the tank. As the sequence continues, the tank’s dead driver lurches back in his seat as the tank heads up the side of another dune. When it reaches the crest and tips down the other side, the cadaver falls forward again, slamming against the steering mechanisms. The morbid opening sequence of Five Graves to Cairo seems aimed to become even more demoralizing than the ending of Wake Island; only then does one of the bodies stir.
