Movies don’t come much more
timely than Billy Wilder’s 1951 drama, Ace in the Hole. It was shot two years after Wilder directed
perhaps his most influential drama, Sunset
Blvd., and just before he embarked on a long string of exuberant comedies,
including Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. Ace in the Hole
also marked the single teaming of Wilder with actor Kirk Douglas, who had just
zoomed to stardom in Champion. In that tough-minded boxing film, Douglas
had scored as a cynical pugilist. Ace in the Hole moves him into the world of daily
journalism, putting a provocative spin on the idea of “fake news.”
The Austrian-born Wilder, who
started his career as a Berlin journalist before the rise of the Nazis,
obviously knew and cared about the power of the press. Press freedom of course
is a cherished American ideal, but one that is easily exploited by men (and
women) who are ruthless and opportunistic. Such a one is Douglas’s Chuck Tatum,
a newspaperman who finds himself stuck in small-town Albuquerque, but will do
anything to get back to the bright lights of New York City. All he needs, it
seems, is the right human-interest story, one that will feed the public’s
imagination day after day and allow him to place himself at the center of the
action.
Such a story pops up in a
rural backwater, where a local has entered a crumbling Indian cliff dwelling
and found himself trapped. Tatum immediately begins calling the shots,
personally communicating with the trapped man and his family, using all his
wiles to endorse a rescue plan that encourages the maximum amount of public
attention. (The film references a famous 1925 real-life incident in which Kentucky
cave explorer Floyd Collins became similarly trapped for some two weeks. The
local newsman who brought his day-to-day story to the world won a Pulitzer
Prize, and the whole tragic episode proved the power of broadcast news to
galvanize the entire nation.)
Ace in the Hole seems to me a rather perfect title, reflecting as it
does both the idea of a man entrapped and a gambler’s reliance on a stroke of
luck on which to base his cold calculations for success. But Paramount Pictures
also toyed with titles like The Big Carnival, reflecting the party
atmosphere that springs up around the site where Leo Minosa lies buried,
complete with carnival rides, food booths, and folksingers wailing out ditties
in the felled man’s honor. The national press, of course, descends too, as had happened for real in 1949 when little Kathy Fiscus fell into a California well. If it’s
a media circus, Tatum serves as the ringmaster, cajoling Leo’s restless wife
(Jan Sterling) into looking appropriately grief-stricken, and craftily
furthering his own career.
This being 1951, he gets his
comeuppance at last, but guilt hits him all too late. The bitter taste of his
last line to the assembled crowds – “The circus is over” – probably rankled
midcentury audiences, living in an optimistic post-World War II era. So
Douglas’s indelible performance was mostly ignored. The film was not a hit in
the U.S., and got little in the way of awards attention, despite a strong
showing overseas. Today no less than Spike Lee considers it one of Hollywood’s
very best films, one that boldly predicted the power of mass media as we know
it.. He also sees it (along with the equally cynical A Face in the Crowd)
as one of the film industry’s strongest statements about American greed: “If
there’s a buck to be made, it’s gonna be made.”
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