Very disappointing...

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Decent WWII thriller. Franchot Tone stars as the only survivor of a tank in Egypt. He barely makes it out of the desert alive, crawling to a former British hotel run by Akim Tamiroff and French maid Anne Baxter. Soon after Tone arrives, the Nazis show up, led by Erich von Stroheim, playing Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. Rommel mistakes Tone for a spy (a waiter who died during an earlier air raid), and he goes along with it. Okay, the plot here is kind of stupid. I think the Nazis are a bit too smart to blindly accept this guy as one of their spies. They don't question him at all. Not on his accent (he's supposed to be Alcase; of course, Tone is supposed to be British and doesn't even attempt a British accent, so, well, whatever), there's no code to prove he is who he claims to be, etc., etc. It's just moronic. Plus, it's established that the dead waiter/spy is still in the bomb shelter, which inevitably leads to a sequence where a Nazi discovers him. You'd think Tone would have thought of that earlier. Tone is a pretty dull actor, Tamiroff is kind of annoying and von Stroheim is a tad too on-the-nose for his role. Baxter is, in fact, the big reason to see the film. She's great, and her role is actually very well written (she's not entirely on Tone's side of the argument, and is frequently thinking about capitulating to the Nazis so they might save her brother from a concentration camp; this is probably an allegory for the occupied France of the time). It's pretty entertaining in spite of its flaws.

Despite some recent reviews of this film that seem to miss the main points of the story and how it HAD to be portrayed and acted, this movie was well-made and a refreshing approach to an interpretation of the war in North Africa.This is especially true for the depiction of Rommel. As has been said here by others, Von Stroheim had the real Rommel nailed pretty well.Wilder was a great director, and knew what he had to do with the actors available to him during the war, and how they would depict the characters in this story.Bravo Mr. Wilder!

It seems that Frank Capra was too busy when this movie was made back in 1943 otherwise this could have been a nice propaganda movie. Of course, goal of such films was to recruit American soldiers and give them motives to fight on other continents which had not been the American practice until that time. Capra was a grandmaster making gems as "Why we fight" serial of propaganda movies (from where Goebbels could learn a lesson) and everything else made during that time was mostly a second class support but apparently very welcomed. This movie is one of these, among the worst I have seen. First of all, General Rommel is presented as a clown in this movie. Man who played with whole ally armies with outnumbered German army, outdated tanks (among them Italian tanks as well) and no logistics. One of the greatest generals in history of world wars is presented as a thug and moron. Person who made ally army commanders look ridiculous was outwitted by a British corporal. Well, do you need to hear anything else? OK. Highly decorated German officer and war hero is a haughty Lovelace and sneaky hoodlum who takes advantage of a woman in greatest pain. List of stupidity never ends in this semi-retarded American propaganda movie whose roots of banality are visible in today movies of that kind made in Hollywood.

Billy Wilder's second US directorial effort is a brilliant anti-war film that skips the preaching/morale boosting of other war films of the time while having the chutzpah to not only cast Erich Von Stroheim, but to cast the famed director as the still living Erwin Rommel. It's an outrageous move by Wilder but one that works! After a very creepy opening scene of a British tank drifting recklessly through the desert sands, it's sole survivor (Franchot Tone) falls out and ends up hiding out in a broken down desert hotel run by Anne Baxter and Akim Tamiroff. Field Marshall Rommel just happens to be on his way...Tone soon goes undercover as part of Rommel's entourage. The results are scary and satiric at the same time, both of which would become constants in the rest of Wilder's filmography. Tone is exceptional as is Baxter. Tamiroff is a bit hammy (as always) but Von Stroheim is wickedly good. FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO is one of the best films of the 1940s.