The New Pictures

Five Graves to Cairo (Paramount) is a somewhat belated dispatch from the Hollywood militarists on Rommel's North African campaign. Paramount's stand-in for the Nazi Desert Fox is the bald and brutal veteran, Erich von Stroheim. Pitted against his terrorism is the youthful team of Franchot Tone and Anne Baxter. United, the wits of these two turn the entire tide of battle.

As a British tankman, Franchot Tone becomes a spy by accident. Lost in the desert during the British retreat of June 1942, sunstruck, temporarily deranged, he stumbles into a roadside inn which is shortly to become German Staff Headquarters. He quickly assumes the clothes and the role of a dead waiter who had been a Nazi agent. Brought before Rommel, he learns that he will be sent to Cairo for another undercover assignment. With a pretty French chambermaid called Mouche (Anne Baxter), he manages to decipher enough in Rommel's papers to locate five mysterious "graves" of buried German Army supplies on the road to Cairo. Then he starts east for Egypt--unaware that Mouche is about to fall before a German firing squad.

From the competence of its camera work (much of it done in photo-effective Arizona sunlight) to the glossiness of its overall atmosphere (redolent of slick-paper magazine fiction), this picture is as Hollywoodish as it well could be. Once again, a packaging job of high sheen fails to conceal the fact that there is very little product inside. Worst error: Akim Tamiroffs irrelevant overacting of the part of an Egyptian hotelkeeper.

Presenting Lily Mars (M.G.M.) is a conventional screen version of 73-year-old Booth Tarkington's tale of a stagestruck small-town girl. This juvenile darling (Judy Garland) gets to Broadway before you can say Jake Shubert, marries a great producer (Van Heflin), and is soon seen swaying in black tulle in a super-sumptuous musical show staged by the lucky fellow.

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