Monday 19 September 2011

Worth a proper gander?

Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Director Billy Wilder adapts a Hungarian play to WW2 setting for this film which stars Fanchot Tone and Anne Baxter. A British soldier is trapped behind enemy lines in North Africa and has to pose as a waiter in a hotel.

Given when this film was made it is not hard to spot it was part of the propaganda effort and some of the dialogue is clearly for political reasons. The plot is a little unrealistic, supposing that the Germans would have known in 1937 that they would have been fighting a war in Egypt at some point. There are also a number of ropey accents on show as American actors fill in for British and French characters.

2/5

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