Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Field Marshal Rommel: We shall take that big fat cigar out of Mr. Churchill's mouth and make him say Heil.

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Field Marshal Rommel: [to the British officer-prisoners] I gave you 20 questions, gentlemen. That is question 21.

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Mouche: I'm not afraid of generals...
Lt. Schwegler: You're not?
Mouche: ...it's lieutenants I'm afraid of.

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In this film, when Rommel (Erich von Stroheim) says to Mouche (Anne Baxter) that her trial will not be conducted under German law in order "to show you we are not the barbarians you think - according to your own law, the Code Napoleon", this is, according to Leonard Rubinstein in his book 'The Great Spy Films', a reference to von Stroheim's character Rauufenstein in La grande illusion. Moreover, according to the Virgin Film Guide, Otto Preminger's POW Camp Commandant character Colonel Oberst von Scherbach in Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder's other WW II movie) is also a play on Erich von Stroheim's similar character Captain von Rauffenstein in Jean Renoir's, La grande illusion.
On the first day that director Billy Wilder's hero, Erich von Stroheim arrived on set, Wilder ran to the wardrobe department to welcome him. He said: "This is a very big moment in my life . . . that I should now be directing the great Stroheim. Your problem, I guess, was that you were ten years ahead of your time." Von Stroheim replied: "Twenty."
This film's opening prologue states: "In June 1942 things looked bleak indeed for the British Eighth Army. It was beaten, scattered, and in flight. Tobruk had fallen. The victorious Rommel and his Afrika Korps were pounding the British back and back toward Cairo and the Suez Canal."
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