The American moviegoing public has the mind of a twelve-year-old. They must have life as it isn’t.
—Ernst Lubitsch
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, and a bastard.
—Billy Wilder
In the fall of 1941, Joseph Sistrom, a junior executive at Paramount, volunteered to search through the stockpile of unproduced scenarios in the story department’s files to find a property that Wilder could dust off and spruce up for filming. He unearthed a reader’s report on a Broadway play, Connie Goes Home by Edward Childs Carpenter, adapted from a Saturday Evening Post short story by Fannie Kilbourne, published in 1921 and titled “Sunny Goes Home.” The reader’s memo was unfavorable, pointing out that the action of the stage play goes steadily downhill and that the play closed after a mere twenty performances. The reader accordingly recommended that Paramount not acquire the play for filming.
Still, Sistrom thought the scenario was promising, and Wilder agreed that the plot had comic possibilities that had not been exploited in the original short story or the stage play. The tale concerns a young woman who fails to establish a career in New York and decides to return to her home in Iowa. Short of funds, she has to disguise herself as a child to buy a half-fare ticket. A man her own age becomes interested in her during the train trip, but he, of course, fears that he will be robbing the cradle if he gets involved with her.
In December 1941, Paramount purchased the screen rights to both the short story and the stage play. In the years ahead, Wilder would become known for his ability to revamp old narrative formulas for the screen. The two sources of The Major and the Minor are but the first of many forgotten stories that Wilder revitalized for film.
Arthur Hornblow Jr., who had produced two popular films from Brackett-Wilder screenplays, Midnight and Hold Back the Dawn, agreed to act as producer on Wilder’s maiden voyage as a director. By mid-January 1942, Brackett and Wilder had nearly completed the first draft of the screenplay, now titled The Major and the Minor. But the plot, which had seemed innocuous enough in outline, now made some of the Paramount executives doubt its acceptability to the industry censor, Joseph Ignatius Breen.
The heroine is called Susan Applegate in the screenplay; in the course of her train journey back to Iowa, she masquerades as twelve-year-old “Sue-Sue.” She is befriended en route by Major Philip Kirby. When he becomes subconsciously attracted to Sue-Sue, the script seems to be dallying with pedophilia. The studio was aware that, only a few years earlier, film critic–novelist Graham Greene had suggested that John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie (1937), which featured child star Shirley Temple, flirted with pedophilia. Though Twentieth Century–Fox had won its libel suit against Greene, Paramount wanted to avoid a similar scandal erupting over The Major and the Minor.
The “safety curtain” that the story and dialogue of The Major and the Minor provided was that the audience is aware that Susan Applegate is a grown woman pretending to be a child. This takes the edge off the shocking implications that the film might otherwise have. Wilder defended the script of The Major and the Minor to Breen, explaining that Philip takes a fatherly stance toward Sue-Sue and is not conscious that he may be physically attracted to her. Consequently, Wilder contended, Philip is convinced that he merely finds Sue-Sue a charming little girl, as when he jokingly observes, “It’s not often that a boy my age gets a smile from someone whizzing by in a kiddy car.” When she finally reveals herself to him as a grown woman at film’s end, Philip is so delighted that he fails to realize that his affection for Sue-Sue may not have been as paternal as he assumed. “The major is sexually aroused by her; he couldn’t help himself,” Wilder explained. “We had here the first American movie about pedophilia,” featuring a pre-Lolita pseudonymphet. “I worried that the audience would be shocked by the story, but it seems that they were not.”1 It may have been clear to the cognoscenti who were on the right wavelength that Philip was attracted to a supposedly underage girl, but most moviegoers apparently did not pick up on the fact that this picture was about “a man who gets a hard-on every time he looks at this woman he thinks is a twelve-year-old.”2
Wilder retained in his Hollywood screenplays the wry, brittle humor he had perfected as a scriptwriter in Berlin. Indeed, it was the Wilder wit that prompted Leslie Halliwell to deem him “Hollywood’s most mischievous immigrant.” Another film historian, who found Wilder’s sardonic humor less to his taste, described his wit as “curdled Lubitsch.”3
A salient example of Wilder’s mordant humor occurs early in the screenplay of The Major and the Minor, which contains a smattering of piquant sexual references. Albert Osborne, a lecherous middle-aged businessman, attempts to seduce Susan Applegate, who has come to his apartment to give him a scalp massage. Osborne leers at Susan, who has just come in out of the rain, and says suggestively, “Why don’t you slip out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?” This line of dialogue is usually attributed to humorist Robert Benchley, who played Osborne. But Benchley did not ad-lib the line; Charles Brackett overheard comedian Charlie Butterworth make this sally of wit at a Manhattan cocktail party.4
When it came to casting, Wilder hoped to get thirty-one-year-old Ginger Rogers to play Susan. Rogers had won an Academy Award for Kitty Foyle (1940), in which she played a working girl whose infant dies, and the actress was a big box office draw at the time. It so happened that Wilder and Rogers shared an agent, Leland Hayward. Of course, Hayward cottoned to the notion of two of his clients working together, and he encouraged Rogers to take the part of Susan in The Major and the Minor. Wilder, who never missed a chance to spice up an anecdote, commented that Rogers agreed to do the film “in the middle of a screw” since Rogers and Hayward were lovers.5
When Rogers was asked why she was willing to play a woman who pretends to be a child, she replied that she had played a youngster in pigtails in a flashback of Kitty Foyle that portrays the heroine’s early life. Furthermore, Brackett and Wilder had written “one hell of a part” for her.6 Rogers, in the course of the film, played not only twelve-year-old Sue-Sue but also Susan Applegate as a mature woman, as well as Susan’s mother, Mrs. Applegate, whom Susan impersonates late in the movie. (Mrs. Applegate also appears in the film, played by Lela Rogers, Ginger’s own mother.)
Wilder secured Ray Milland to play Major Philip Kirby by a rather unorthodox means: He followed Milland’s car out of the Paramount parking lot one afternoon. He caught up with Milland at a stoplight and yelled at him, asking if he would like to be in his picture. Milland remembers smiling and responding, “Sure!”7 It did not matter to him, Milland explained, that it was the first picture Wilder was directing in Hollywood, since Milland had acted in Arise, My Love (1940), a very good film about the Spanish civil war that Brackett and Wilder had written. Benchley, a celebrated humorist and sometimes movie actor (Foreign Correspondent), was content to play the lascivious Albert Osborne because he and Brackett had both been on the staff of the New Yorker in the 1920s.
Wilder endeavored to round up the best crew he could muster at Paramount for his first venture as a Hollywood filmmaker. “I needed all the help I could get,” he said. Cinematographer Leo Tover, film editor Doane Harrison, and camera operator Ernest Laszlo had all done good work on Hold Back the Dawn. (Laszlo would later serve as director of photography on Wilder’s Stalag 17.)
In February 1942, the studio drew up a budget of $928,000, a rather standard budget for an A picture. Brackett, who had seniority over Wilder at Paramount, was to receive $27,000 for coauthoring the screenplay, while Wilder was allocated $17,200 as coauthor of the script. Wilder’s services as director merited a measly $9,800. Hence his combined salary for cowriting and directing the film came to the same amount Brackett would receive for cowriting the screenplay. As Wilder noted sardonically, that meant that he virtually directed the picture for free.
Wilder confided to Lubitsch that he was terrified at the thought of directing his first Hollywood film. Lubitsch invited several immigrant directors to come to the set on March 12, 1942, the first day of shooting, to give Wilder moral support. Among them was William Wyler (Wuthering Heights). Preston Sturges, a native-born American, showed up on his own because he wanted to encourage Wilder, only the second screenwriter to become a writer-director at Paramount. As it happened, Sturges’s The Lady Eve was the leading moneymaker for Paramount at the time. Wilder cleared the set of well-wishers by 10:00 A.M., and at 10:25 he called Ginger Rogers to the soundstage for the first shot.
The first thing Wilder learned about directing was that there could be only one boss on the soundstage. He knew he would be lost if he allowed the actors to push him around. “Making a movie is like flying a plane,” he explained. “Once you get off the ground you must be in full control of the flight if you are to avoid a crash.”8 Even though The Major and the Minor was Wilder’s first Hollywood film, said Rogers, “from day one I saw that Billy knew what to do.” He was very self-confident but would listen to the actors’ suggestions.9 He began each rehearsal by having the actors read the scene together; then he had them walk through it on the set; finally he would figure out where to put the camera and where the camera moves would be. At that point he would do the first take.
Charles Coleman Jr. was appointed Wilder’s assistant director, a post the dependable individual would hold for fifteen years, through The Spirit of St. Louis (1957). Coleman was also second unit director on The Major and the Minor; he was sent to Delafield, Wisconsin, to shoot background exteriors at St. John’s Military Academy, which stands in for Wallace Military Academy in the movie.
It was during the making of The Major and the Minor that film editor Doane Harrison became an important member of Wilder’s production team. Harrison, a lanky, laconic individual, had begun as an editor of Mack Sennett comedy shorts in the 1920s; he spent most of his career at Paramount. Wilder asked Harrison to be by his side while he was shooting and frequently conferred with him about composing the shots and selecting the camera angles. He planned each scene with Harrison’s advice because he wanted to make the film on the set and not allow the editor to remake it in the editing room—under the watchful eye of the producer. Wilder, from the outset of his career as a director, learned from Harrison to shoot just enough footage to enable the editor to put together a given scene one way—his way. For example, if Wilder decided that he did not want a close-up in a particular scene, he simply did not film one. In his opinion, a close-up was a special thing that should be used sparingly, like a trump in bridge. Wilder did not give the producer extra footage “to monkey around with” in the cutting room: “When I finish a film there is nothing on the cutting room floor but cigarette butts, chewing gum wrappers and tears.”10
Beginning with Sunset Boulevard (1950), Harrison would be designated as supervising editor; he would continue to advise Wilder as associate producer from The Seven Year Itch (1955) through The Fortune Cookie (1966). Wilder’s creative association with Harrison was one of the most enduring professional relationships of his career. “I went to Doane Harrison College,” said Wilder in tribute.11 In all, Harrison collaborated with Wilder on twenty-three pictures over three decades.
Principal photography was finished on The Major and the Minor on May 9, 1942. Perhaps because the war does not figure in the plot in any significant way, Richard Armstrong incorrectly states that Wilder “completed shooting a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor” on December 7, 1941.12 Rather, it is because the film’s literary sources date from the 1920s that it more or less ignores the impending war.
For the record, Wilder brought in his first Hollywood movie within striking distance of the budget and only six days behind schedule. Perhaps his experience a decade earlier of making Mauvaise graine, a low-budget independent picture in Paris, had taught Wilder how to cut corners during filming. He fell behind schedule, he pointed out, only while filming the scenes set in the military academy, such as the school dance, which involved two hundred teenagers as extras.
After principal photography wrapped, Wilder plunged into postproduction. Since he and Harrison had planned the total editing scheme during shooting, Harrison cut the film at a brisk pace, conferring with Wilder along the way. Robert Emmett Dolan wrote the background music for the picture after consulting with Wilder. Dolan was a young composer fresh from providing the incidental music for the Bing Crosby–Fred Astaire vehicle Holiday Inn (1942). Dolan employed Victor Shertzinger’s waltz “Dream Lover” as one of the numbers played at the cadets’ school dance. Then he did variations on it throughout the rest of the background score. Dolan borrowed the melodious waltz from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1929 musical The Love Parade. Perhaps Wilder suggested it to Dolan as an homage to his mentor.
Wilder’s first Hollywood picture opens with a printed prologue, a practice he would follow intermittently throughout his film career. This prologue states, “The Dutch bought New York from the Indians in 1626, and by May 1941, there wasn’t an Indian left who regretted it.” The first shot of the movie focuses on a street sign that reads “Park Avenue.” It is night, and the camera pans down to Susan Applegate on her way to Albert Osborne’s apartment to give him a scalp treatment.
Osborne attempts to ply Susan with liquor and clumsily tries to coax her into doing a rumba with him (“We could make beautiful music together”). But Susan resists Osborne’s blandishments and reads the riot act to him in a speech that provides a nifty example of Brackett and Wilder’s crisp, clever dialogue. Susan declares that she has had quite enough of wicked New York City: “From the bargain basement to the Ritz Tower, I got myself stared at, glanced over, cuddled up against.” She is fed up. “This is Susan Applegate signing off!” But the libidinous Osborne is not to be deterred, so she baptizes him with a generous dollop of egg shampoo. She escapes his clutches by hightailing it to the nearest elevator, while Osborne literally has egg on his face. By now Susan is determined to escape the bevy of male admirers who constantly plague her.
Susan soon boards the train for Stevenson, Iowa, disguised as a preteen named Sue-Sue, and encounters Major Philip Kirby on board. Wilder said that, when he first saw Ginger Rogers with her bosoms taped down, wearing pigtails and bobby socks, carrying a balloon and sucking on a lollypop, “I knew I had a picture”—a favorite phrase of Lubitsch’s.
Donning a disguise is a recurring element in Wilder’s movies. As we have seen, in Midnight, Claudette Colbert masquerades as a Hungarian baroness. In addition, Wilder’s very next film, Five Graves to Cairo, features a British officer who impersonates a deceased espionage agent.
The plot of The Major and the Minor goes into overdrive when Susan accepts Philip’s invitation to spend the weekend visiting the exclusive Wallace Military Academy for Boys in High Creek, Indiana, where he is on the faculty. Susan must maintain her charade while at the institute. Philip’s vision is impaired in one eye, which suggests that he is not perceptive in sizing up others; he fails to “see through” Susan’s disguise. He calls himself Sue-Sue’s “Uncle Philip.”
Philip takes Sue-Sue to stay with the family of his huffy fiancée Pamela Hill (Rita Johnson). Philip belongs to the local elite social set, as does Pamela. She and her precocious kid sister Lucy (Diana Lynn) are alone in suspecting that Sue-Sue is a phony. Pamela says pointedly to Philip at one point, “When you felt the urge to become an uncle, you should have found a less inflammatory niece.” Lucy confronts Susan directly. When Sue-Sue gazes into Lucy’s fishbowl and says the goldfish “wants his din-din,” Lucy snaps, “Stop that baby talk, will you? You’re not twelve just because you’re acting like six. Maybe you can fool the grown-ups, but you can’t fool me!” Yet Lucy does not give Susan away. As a matter of fact, Lucy does not approve of the way that her older sister bosses Philip around and in no time at all decides that Philip would be better off with Susan. “You’re much more my sister than Pamela,” she tells Susan later.
Susan must fend off the hot-blooded cadets who begin making advances on her as Sue-Sue. One of the cadets, Clifford Osborne, turns out to be the son of Albert Osborne. Clifford even uses one of his father’s lines on Sue-Sue: “We could make beautiful music together”—like father, like son! Another cadet, a randy young man named Anthony Wigton (Raymond Roe), maneuvers Sue-Sue into a clinch and a kiss on their first encounter. The second time around, she distracts him by coaxing him to tap-dance with her.
Dismayed by the manner in which the cadets are pursuing Sue-Sue, Philip summons her to his office for a helping of paternal advice. In the course of his mini-lecture on the facts of life, he confesses, “When I look at you with my bum eye, you look almost grown-up; Sue-Sue, you’re a knockout!” William K. Everson observes, “The sexual implications . . . of the major’s growing fondness for a girl he believes to be only twelve [are] surprisingly risqué for a film of 1942.”13
Sue-Sue is invited to the cadets’ school dance, where Albert Osborne, who has come to the institute to visit his son, shows up. He inevitably recognizes Susan in the guise of Sue-Sue and informs Pamela who Sue-Sue really is. Pamela accordingly issues an ultimatum to Susan: she must depart immediately, or Pamela will reveal her true identity to Philip. Susan hotfoots it out of town, without bidding goodbye to Philip, and presses on for her home in Stevenson. When Susan’s mother asks her what happened to her on the trip from New York City, Susan replies cryptically, “I went to a masquerade.”
Philip decides to stop over in Stevenson on his way to the West Coast to see Sue-Sue. Susan dispatches her mother to the attic so that she can impersonate her mother with Philip, since she does not want her mother to meet him. Susan dons her mother’s apron and spectacles and waits for Philip on the front porch. Philip informs her that Pamela broke their engagement to marry Anthony Wigton’s wealthy father. He proceeds to the depot. While standing on the platform, awaiting his train, Philip notices an attractive woman dressed in a tailored suit and picture hat who bears a strong resemblance to Sue-Sue. She tells him she is off to marry a major. Philip instantly recognizes her and cries, “Sue-Sue!” With that, they board the train together. A cloud of steam billows up from the train engine and blots the couple from view; they vanish, as if by magic.
The critics found The Major and the Minor a fresh, funny comedy, as did the mass audience.14 Rogers gave a refreshingly flavored and rounded performance as the preadolescent Sue-Sue, as the mature Susan Applegate, and as Susan’s mother. Her one regret was that she never had the opportunity to work with Wilder again. She remarked on TV talk shows that, as a star at the time, she helped his career along while he was making his first Hollywood film, but Wilder did not seem to appreciate the favor she did him. Asked about this, he answered, “I showed my appreciation—she got top billing.”
The Major and the Minor is a startlingly assured film, with none of the cheap tricks or showiness of a tyro director desperate for a studio calling card. “Everyone expected me to make something ‘fancy-schmancy,’ ” said Wilder. “Yet I made something commercial; I brought back the most saleable hunk of celluloid I could.”15 Wilder always stubbornly maintained that his films did not qualify him to be named the heir of Ernst Lubitsch, but with The Major and the Minor, Wilder proved what he inherited from Lubitsch: Wilder brought to his first Hollywood picture a sophistication and wit that were totally lacking in the film’s literary sources. For his film, “Wilder wrote dialogue that ran the gamut from wisecracks to double entendre,” Bernard Dick writes. It was the sort of dry wit and banter that would come to define the Wilder touch in his subsequent films. For example, when Philip asks Sue-Sue how she feels, she responds, “Sue-Sue is so-so.” Moreover, the scene between Susan and Albert Osborne is peppered with Osborne’s saucy bons mots. In the present film, Wilder’s wit is not heavy-handed, says Dick; “Wilder winks rather than leers.”16 The Major and the Minor is a crazy screwball comedy in the best tradition.
The front office was more than satisfied with Wilder’s handling of The Major and the Minor, which he brought in nearly on schedule and only slightly over budget. “They were obviously not going to send me back to my typewriter, but allow me to continue directing,” he said, since the picture was a commercial success. After directing this film, he convinced the studio to allow Brackett to act as the producer of the subsequent films they coscripted, to make doubly certain that their screenplays would be committed to celluloid without interference from the front office.
Wilder wanted a change of pace for his next film. He did not want to be typed as a director of romantic comedies, so he was looking for a solid melodrama. The literary source for his next film was an obscure play by the Hungarian playwright Lajos Biró, Hotel Imperial, a World War I espionage drama. It had never been produced on Broadway. Biró had written the play after the First World War and brought it with him when he immigrated to Hollywood in 1924 to become a screenwriter.
Paramount had made a silent film of Hotel Imperial in 1926 starring Pola Negri, which was directed by Mauritz Stiller and produced by Erich Pommer. This was one of the two American films that Pommer, for whom Wilder worked at Ufa in Berlin, produced in his brief sojourn in Hollywood in the 1920s.17 Ernst Lubitsch planned to remake the picture at Paramount in 1936 as I Loved a Soldier, with Marlene Dietrich in the lead. But Lubitsch abandoned the production when Dietrich bowed out of the project. Journeyman director Robert Florey eventually filmed it in 1939 with Isa Miranda replacing Dietrich, and it flopped.
Both the 1926 and the 1939 versions of Hotel Imperial follow the original play pretty carefully. The play is set in a Balkan border town; by sheer coincidence, the town is Sucha, Wilder’s birthplace. “Sucha is a small Galician town” that, in the play, the Russians capture from the Austrians.18 The town’s shabby hotel serves as the Russian army’s headquarters. An Austrian officer stays on at the hotel in the guise of a waiter to spy on the enemy. When the officer kills a Russian soldier who has uncovered his identity, he escapes to the Austrian lines. A Polish chambermaid is accused of the murder by the Russian general; she is about to be shot when the Austrian officer returns with a squad of soldiers and rescues her.
Biró himself brought the play to Wilder’s attention in 1942. He suggested that Wilder update the story to World War II and build it around Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps, who were then fighting the British in the desert. The play appealed to Wilder because it involved a character perpetrating a deception by assuming a disguise—already a favorite theme of his. Still, to transplant the story from World War I to World War II would require considerable overhauling. Brackett and Wilder changed the title to Five Graves to Cairo to dissociate their project from the 1939 fiasco.
Paramount officially assigned Brackett and Wilder to the film on August 10, 1942. The studio allocated a budget of $825,000 for the production. The budget for The Major and the Minor had been somewhat larger, mostly because Rogers commanded a star’s salary; there were no expensive stars in Five Graves to Cairo. For example, Erich von Stroheim, who would play Rommel and be featured prominently in the publicity layouts for the film, would receive a mere $30,000 for his efforts. Wilder was to receive a bigger piece of the pie than he had on the previous film. He would pocket $31,500 for coauthoring the screenplay and $21,000 for directing the picture, for a total almost twice the amount he had been paid for cowriting and directing The Major and the Minor. Clearly, Wilder’s status was improving at Paramount.
Brackett and Wilder changed the setting from a Balkan village to a town on the Libyan border in North Africa. The Austrian officer in the play became a British officer, John Bramble; the Polish chambermaid was now a French servant girl named Mouche; and the Russian general was transformed into Rommel, the Desert Fox.
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 January 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 desert 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.
One criticism of the picture, which originated with the French film historian Georges Sadoul, centers on the character of Mouche. After she fails to make a bargain with Rommel for her brother’s freedom, she offers herself to Lieutenant Schwegler, who deludes her by making empty promises to save her brother just to manipulate her into a sexual liaison. Sadoul was outraged that Mouche personified France “as a softhearted whore at the beck and call of Nazi supermen” like Schwegler. Sarris comments that Sadoul’s criticism is symptomatic of the way that Wilder “has been penalized for being more honest and more open about the realities of human sexuality than most of his Hollywood colleagues.”31
It is Lieutenant Schwegler who discovers Davos’s body among the debris in the hostelry’s basement; he rightly guesses that Bramble is masquerading as the deceased Davos. So Bramble is forced to liquidate him. Bramble is convinced that it is his duty to relay the strategic information about Rommel’s supply depots to the high command at the British headquarters in Cairo. Mouche enables Bramble to make good his getaway and carry out his mission by taking the blame for Schwegler’s murder. Rommel suspects that Mouche killed Schwegler to punish him for duping her into a sexual relationship. He tells her, “To prove to you that we are not the Huns you think we are, you will be tried according to your own French law—the Napoleonic Code.” Rommel presides over a court of inquiry, which finds her guilty, and she is summarily executed by a firing squad. Pace Sadoul, Mouche is one of Wilder’s most admirable heroines, since she valiantly sacrifices her life for the war effort.
Montgomery’s rout of Rommel is presented in a montage. It consists mainly of Harrison’s skillful manipulation of stock newsreel footage, but it is nonetheless quite effective. (Incidentally, Mander looked all the more impressive in the part of Colonel Fitzhume because of his coincidental resemblance to General Montgomery, who appears in the footage of the battle sequence.) And so on November 12, 1942, the British army comes back to Sidi Halfaya. Bramble returns to the little desert inn as a newly made officer in Montgomery’s Eighth Army. The gutless Farid has restored the portrait of Queen Victoria to its former place of prominence in the hotel lobby. Farid tells Bramble of Mouche’s execution.
In the film’s source play, Hotel Imperial, the hero arrives in time to save the heroine from being executed by the enemy general. But Wilder rejected a contrived, last-minute rescue for Mouche. He consigned her to a tragic death, which occasions Bramble’s stirring eulogy. Bramble places on her grave the pearl-handled parasol she had always wanted, which he had intended to give to her personally as a present. He addresses her spirit, concluding, “Don’t worry, Mouche, we’re after them now. We’re going to blast the blazes out of them.”
In directing Five Graves, Wilder made a film for the eye as well as for the ear, as exemplified by the movie’s visual metaphors. In several scenes Wilder had Stroheim carry a fly swatter, which takes on symbolic implications in various situations. Several reviewers called it a riding crop, but the script identifies it as a “fly swisher.” It resembles a whisk broom with a foot-long handle, “which Rommel flicks repeatedly to shoo away flies.” Rommel at times wields the fly swatter as if it were a royal scepter, implying to all and sundry that he is a person of power and authority. At one point he employs the fly swatter as a whip, to strike Mouche across the face while he is interrogating her about Schwegler’s death. It thus serves as a warning that Rommel is quite capable of harsh measures whenever he feels that they are necessary. Moreover, Lennig reminds us, “it prevents Rommel from appearing too likeable, a necessity for wartime propaganda.”32 Stroheim dominates the screen with his imposing presence in every sequence in which he appears. “Five Graves to Cairo is notable for its unsensationalized, nonstereotypical view of Rommel,” writes Kevin Lally; “the film treats him with deference, respecting him as a brilliant tactician and mighty opponent.”33
Five Graves to Cairo was hailed as an ingeniously plotted melodrama with uniformly fine performances, a beautiful, dark gem among World War II films. The lion’s share of the praise, of course, went to Stroheim’s peerless portrayal of Rommel. In fact, the movie rejuvenated Stroheim’s acting career; he would repay Wilder by giving one of his last and best performances in Sunset Boulevard seven years later. Five Graves to Cairo still holds up as a top-notch espionage thriller with nary a sag. In Wilder’s estimate, it is one of the best pictures he directed.
For his next film, Wilder chose to do a thriller, an adaptation of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. Cinematographer John Seitz, film editor Doane Harrison, and composer Miklos Rozsa were committed to move on from Five Graves to Double Indemnity. Much to Wilder’s surprise, after collaborating with him on the screen treatment, Charles Brackett begged off, saying that a grim and gory crime novella like Double Indemnity was simply not his cup of tea. Since Wilder’s partnership with Brackett had often been described in the press as a marriage, Wilder accused Brackett of infidelity and went looking for another screenwriter to replace him on this project.