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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

Five Graves to Cairo

1943 film by Billy Wilder

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 5, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Five Graves to Cairo is a 1943 American war film directed and co-written by Billy Wilder and starring Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Tamiroff and Erich von Stroheim. It is based on the 1917 stage play Hotel Imperial by Hungarian dramatist Lajos Bíró, which had previously been adapted into a 1927 silent film and a 1939 sound film. As the original play was written during the First World War, the film relocates the story's events to the North Africa front of the then-ongoing Second World War.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Five Graves to Cairo” as 1943 film by Billy Wilder. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Five, Graves and Cairo.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1943, 1917, 1927, 1939—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Five, Graves and Cairo providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Five Graves to Cairo”, the useful work is to connect “1943 film by Billy Wilder” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1917, 1927 and 1939.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Five Graves to Cairo”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Five Graves to Cairo primary sources, Five Graves to Cairo archive and Five research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Five Graves to Cairo”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Five Graves to Cairo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.