Five Graves to Cairo

An impressive wartime espionage thriller, with Tone as a British corporal holed up in a Nazi-controlled hotel in the North African desert, and posing as a German in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of Rommel's secret fuel dumps. The script by Wilder and his long-term associate Charles Brackett is taut and intelligent, but the film's real strengths are John Seitz's superb photography of the desert and hotel, and von Stroheim's resumption of his 'man you love to hate' persona as Rommel. Lajos Biro's source play had been filmed twice before as Hotel Imperial (1927 and 1939), and in 1951 resurfaced in an engaging parody version as Hotel Sahara.