American Cinematographer - March 2003 - 84

A Pair of Aces

According to the
for Five Graves
built

press

book

Cairo, the hotel was

single stage "and was, in
huge set." It consisted of
four-walled, interconnecting
on a

effect,
12

to

one

rooms.

Seitz, the book continues

(with perhaps only slight hyper¬
bole), found the construction "one
of the

most

'shootable'

sets

ever

erected." The

"I

Sunset Boulevard. But Seitz's cine¬

shot outside Yuma, Arizona, and the

small!" Faded
silent-movie star
Norma Desmond

matography lends the settings such
presence that they almost become
characters in their own right.

with

am big. it's the
pictures that got

(Gloria Swanson)
recalls her glory
days for hack
screenwriter Joe

Gillis (William

Holden) in Sunset
Boulevard.
Far

right:

John F. Seitz.

Five Graves

Cairo, which
Seitz considered his best work, is set
in

a

to

bombed-out hotel in the

Libyan

Desert. The desolate locale is estab¬

lished in the
when

a

opening

tank with

a

dead

sequence,
climbs

crew

and down an endless stretch of
gray-and-white
dunes.
Seitz's
photography has a surreal quality.
up

Indio,

near

California.

In

an

American Film Institute oral

within the hotel, which is rendered

from

light from the sky, nothing else. I'll
give Billy Wilder some credit for it

place of intrigue and danger.
That
danger is artfully
portrayed during a night sequence in
which a Nazi officer (Peter Van Eyck)
and Tone's English soldier fight hand
to hand. The Nazi drops a flashlight,

because

and the

history
the early 1970s, Seitz explained

interviewer James Ursini that on
location, "I used minus reflectors
to

[and] black velvet.... All we had was

we

discussed the effect. We

When a lone survivor (Franchot
Tone) falls from the tank, ridges of

trying to simulate heat. We
tried some other things, but we
didn't need them. This was enough."

light and shadow in the sand around
him form patterns worthy of a

pervades the film. Even inside the

modern-art

hotel, the desert sun outside the walls

canvas.

After

sun-drenched dunes, he

a

trek

comes

over

upon

village - black shapes at the edge
of a gleaming sea. The entire
sequence is a visual paradox: starkly
realistic, yet dreamlike. Ed Sikov,
author of the Wilder biography On
a

Sunset

Boulevard, notes that this

opening "is so breathtakingly beauti¬
ful that the art actually threatens to
overwhelm the revelation of charac¬
ter, a

rarity in Wilder's career."
The sand-dune sequence was

80 March 2003

Egyptian village was constructed
painstaking attention to detail

single set allowed the
camera to track
along a corridor or
crane from floor to floor, thus
push¬
ing the action forward and main¬
taining a clear sense of geography

were

Indeed,

can't

be

shines

on

a

sense

of

heat

forgotten; perspiration
the bald pate of Field

Marshal

Rommel
(Erich von
Stroheim), and hot spots gleam on

the faces of other characters.

Using
only light filtered through latticed
windows and slats in the roof, Seitz
establishes the rhythm of hot days
with illumination that evokes

ing and afternoon. His

use

and shadow also contributes
film's

morn¬

of light

atmosphere of mystery.

to

as

a

camera

tilts down

to stare at

the round

lamp while the men strug¬
gle offscreen in the dark. Two
gunshots produce flashes of light at
the edge of the frame, and we then
follow the flashlight's beam as a hand
picks the light source up and reveals
the dead Nazi on the floor. Offering
only a shadowy glimpse of death's
aftermath, the image heightens the
scene's drama and suspense. (Seitz's
lighting of the scene is reminiscent of
an

effect he achieved

some

20 years

earlier in The Four Horsemen

of the
Apocalypse, which depicts soldiers on
a dark battlefield lit
by the ghastly
flare of a bomb.)

the

With Double
took

his

Indemnity, Seitz
experimentation to
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