Five Graves To Cairo (1943, Billy Wilder)

Thank you Turner Classic Movies for showing this rare Wilder gem (and one of Tarantino's Favorite WW2 Films). Wilder's second feature as a director is an WW2 intrigue tale with all the Wilder prerequisites: colorful characters, social/political commentary, and inventive dialogue and set pieces.
In his book of interviews with Wilder, Cameron Crowe compliments the filmmaker by commenting that the opening of the film is like something out of Indiana Jones. And he's right! At the top of the film, we see a tank driving up the desert from the distance. A man hangs off the side. He wakes to find himself the only alive soldier amongst a renegade tankful of dead bodies. He jumps out and the tank drives off. He cant keep up and the tank drives into the distance. It's a great opening with my summary doing it no justice.
Classic bit of Wilder wit: The Field General Rommel (played by Erich von Stroheim) instructs his gopher that upon his return to Cairo he wants to see a specific opera, but "omitting the second act, because it is too long and not too good." Of course this happens during Five Graves' second act which was not too long and very very good.
This film has a great fight scene between the waiter/soldier and the German lieutenant takes place in the dark and we only see a dropped flashlight shining up at us from the floor. When it is picked up, we see who lost the fight.
This film needs to be released on disc.

A Foreign Affair (1948, Billy Wilder)

All Movie Guide Summary:

Writer/director Billy Wilder (in collaboration with producer/writer Charles Brackett) earned his first critical condemnation with A Foreign Affair. Reviewers accused Wilder (as they would so often in the future) of moral bankruptcy, challenging him to prove what could possibly be funny about the Nazi war guilt, the bombed-out city of Berlin, the postwar European black market or attempted suicide. All of these elements are in Foreign Affair, and all are very funny. John Lund is an American army captain carrying on a casual affair with Berlin songstress Marlene Dietrich, who accepts Lund's attentions so long as there are contraband cigarettes and nylons added to the bargain. Iowa congresswoman Jean Arthur is sent as part of an American fact-finding delegation to Berlin, and Lund is compelled to clean up his act--or at least pretend to. Despite her initial shock at the corruption all around her, straitlaced Arthur eventually falls for Lund, but Dietrich has been at this game a lot longer. For an interesting cinematic and sociological exercise, A Foreign Affair should be shown in tandem with Wilder's 1961 Cold War comedy One, Two, Three.