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Billy Wilder allows himself one cinematic coup—the unmanned tank up and down Sahara dunes like "a five-passenger hearse," for the benefit of David Lean—before outlining the North African Campaign in a bombed-out, mud-bricked fleapit. The Nazis between Alexandria and Cairo set up headquarters in a hotel, Erich von Stroheim as Rommel is given riding crop and peaked cap and introduced mid-dictation, promising the Führer no more parted Red Seas. "We shall take that big, fat cigar out of Mr. Churchill's mouth and make him say heil." The manager (Akim Tamiroff) is a timorous buffoon until he remembers his runaway wife, suddenly he's Raimu. The chambermaid (Anne Baxter) is a scoffing Parisian refugee with family in concentration camps, the panel by her bed lights up nightly with German officers requesting her services. Into this sand trap stumbles the disbanded British corporal (Franchot Tone) in a double charade, club-footed waiter and Teutonic double agent. "A familiar scene, reminiscent of bad melodrama," sneers the kommandant of the intrigue around him, meanwhile Wilder and Charles Brackett keep the suspense formidably wry and barbed. Stroheim has the most galvanizing character, along with the best lines: His Desert Fox is a bull-necked architect who can't resist parading his genius before prisoners at brunch. Baxter's sexual deal-making and Fortunio Bonanova's aria-loving Milanese general ("Can a nation that belches understand a nation that sings?") are but two instances of a continental sensibility sardonically saucing Hollywood flag-waving, though straight tension is hardly overlooked. (A lethal scuffle during a raid is illuminated with a dropped flashlight and a couple of gun blasts.) A Foreign Affair picks up on the closing image, Stalag 17 completes the Grand Illusion homage. With Peter van Eyck, Miles Mander, and Ian Keith. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |