1951: Ace in the Hole

Ace in the Hole (Wilder, 1951) 10/10


“Bad news sells best. ‘Cause good news is no news” (Charles “Chuck” Tatum)

"Fuck them all! It is the best picture I ever made" (Billy Wilder)

In 2003, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was forced to resign from his esteemed American employer after he was caught fabricating evidence about the Beltway sniper shootings. Blair’s breach of journalistic principle smeared the New York Times’ reputation for accuracy: briefly inducing a public debate about media practices and the distortion of the truth for profit. Ironically the same publication fifty years earlier denounced Viennese director Billy Wilder for the creation of what Times film critic Bosley Crowther called a “preposterous” character: an immoral and opportunistic journalist who misleads the nation with his reporting of a mining accident in rural New Mexico.

In a brilliantly savage and astringent lead performance, Kirk Douglas stars as Charles “Chuck” Tatum, an ace reporter whose intoxicating behaviour has led to his dismissal from every major news publication from New York to Chicago. Arriving in a broken down convertible in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tatum offers his services to editor Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall) for a fifth of his New York salary. Boot agrees on the condition that the openly alcoholic and reckless Tatum maintains his sobriety and adheres to the paper's chief policy: ”Tell The Truth.”

Believing in his own hype, Tatum expects his newly acquired Alburquerque position to last no more than a few weeks; before being once more snapped up by a large Eastern paper. One year later however, the increasingly agitated Tatum is still attached to his desk in a sweaty New Mexico office. Desperate for his break, Tatum begrudingly accepts his latest assignment: a report on an annual rattlesnake hunt in the baking desert. Along the way, he and the paper’s junior photographer Herbie (Bob Arthur) stop at a local gas station were the windswept monotony of the summer is broken by a wailing police siren heading toward a Native American cliff dwelling.

Following the police car, Tatum learns that the gas station’s propertier Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) is trapped in a collapsed cave in a failed attempt to steal some burial pots. Climbing into the sacred cave in order to interview and photograph the local entrepeneur, Tatum sees that Leo’s legs are trapped under a mass of debris: rendering his escape from the mountain impossible without a rescue squad. Sensing his good fortune, Tatum builds a story around a Native American curse, a trapped war hero and Lorraine (Jan Sterling) his grieving wife.

According to the engineers who arrived on the scene however, the removal of Leo from the crevice is little more than a sixteen hour operation involving the butressing of the failing walls. Dismayed at this fact and dreaming of glory and financial gain, Tatum works in tandem with a corrupt sherriff (Ray Teal) and a servile former truck driver-turned-contractor to use an alternate drilling method, which will take days rather than hours to complete. Luckily, for Tatum, Leo’s cynical Baltimore-born wife equally wants her husband to remain trapped in the cave. Bored and trapped in their diminutive outpost, Lorraine tells Tatum of her hunger to head East and her desire to quench her sexual thirst for him.

Slightly intrigued by her sexual advances, Tatum quickly realizes that Lorraine’s planned desertion of Leo will hurt the appeal of his articles. With his stories producing a media frenzy, the remote outpost is quickly beseiged by tourists who fill the coffers of Leo and his parents small store and subsequently fund Lorraine’s temporary loyalty to her husband. Yet, as more vacationers enter the Minosa property, the quiet and somber desolation is replaced with vivaciousness. Sightseers begin paying a fee to visit the area, while the S&M Entertainment Company erects a carnival and a train service shuttles in more visitors; as the area turns into a media circus driven by profit and greed, rather than the desire to save a dying man.

Ace In The Hole is arguably the most caustic and cynical film ever to come out of the studio system. Wilder took his idea from a real life cave-in, which Douglas mentions in the film. In 1925, cave explorer Floyd Collins was trapped in a Kentucky mine for eighteen days. Before Collins’ death- almost three weeks after his intial entry into the mine- his story was told by a local reporter, who eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for his riveting accounts. Collins’ fateful foray was even fictionalized into a best-selling novel “The Cave” by “All The Kings Men” author Robert Penn Warren. Yet, as writer, producer and director, Wilder- unlike other Hollywood producers- was less interested in the human interest story, but the possibilities of the explotation of a human interest story. Fresh off his acclaimed Sunset Boulevard, Wilder was ready to continue with his interest in the more sadistic and immoral elements of human nature: greed, lust, betrayal and murder.

But in an era when critics held great sway and audiences expected even the most sinister of protagonists to acquire a degree of moral growth, Ace in the Hole was a bitter pill to swallow. Critics of the period derided Wilder’s treatment of their profession; while audiences were unable to accept the personal motives of one of cinema’s most repellant protagonists in Douglas’ Charles Tatum, nor the masses jocund lust for such a depressing story of turning tragedy into entertainment. Yet in an era when the private destructive streaks of fallen pop stars and minor celebrities become tabloid fodder and gossip channel filler, one can see that Wilder’s film was merely not in bad taste as his critics concluded, but simply far ahead of its time.

Flawlessly acted and directed, Ace in the Hole is a scathing, yet brutally honest delight: a gritty alternative to present-day Hollywood in which yesteryear's forum of images and ideas has now been replaced by a visually and contextually vacuous contingent of moribund plots and critical dormancy . Lauded at the Venice Film Festival and popular throughout Europe, the picture was Wilder’s first critical and commercial flop, which reduced his standing at Paramount as the film lost money despite a name change (Big Carnival) and radical attempts to briefly release the film on television. Whether, the screen was silver or small, audiences turned away in numbers: shunning Kirk Douglas’ star power and Wilder’s acidic vision.

Contrary to popular belief, Wilder’s sardonic approach to life was not a rarity in 1951. In the 1940’s Preston Sturges had created a bitter portfolio of films such as Sullivan’s Travels and Unfaithfully Yours; Orson Welles had directed two particularly abrasive films in 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons and 1948’s The Lady From Shanghai, while Welles himself had appeared as the charming, yet immoral Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man. Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Hitchcock’s Rope both featured sinister characters comparable to Welles’ Lime. In Mark Robson's 1949 film Champion Kirk Douglas played a brutal pugalist, the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1950 was won by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s biting All About Eve and even Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ In the Rain is a masterpiece of alkaline perceptions and bittersweet sentiments.

And of course in 1950, Wilder himself had written and directed Sunset Boulevard: a film which bears striking similarities to Ace in the Hole. Both films featuring failed writers down on their luck who arrive at their respective unlikely destinations via a malfunctioning convertible. Each character attempts to use this improbable situation to get their careers back on track. For Gillis’ his job re-writing Norma Desmond’s infantile script is meant to provide him with the resources to pay off his creditors and perhaps through his job moonlighting at Paramount on a screenplay, he can revive his career. For Tatum, his job in Albuquerque is simply an attempt to revive his reputation and start anew back East.

However for both immoral protagonists, they are unable to escape this situation. Each becomes tied down to the financial and material gains extracted from their jobs, as well as the unwanted guilt which comes with it. Joe Gillis realizes he has a “long term contract, with no options” as Norma’s ghostwriter-cum-gigolo who is distraught by his attempts to leave her side; Tatum knows that his career rests on Leo’s fate, which produces sparse and pithy outbursts of emotional responsibility. Additionally, both mortally expire at the hands of the unwanted women who they have used for financial gain in return for sexual favours.

More so than Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole also delves into the cult of celebrity and the perversity of human entertainment. Thanks to Tatum’s “way with words,” a small community springs up in the Mojave wasteland around the Minosa family trading post. On their way to a lakeside cottage, the grounds' first batch of visitors inform Tatum and Lorraine that they are simply passing through and wish to visit the cliffs for thirty minutes since the experience will be educational for their small children. Yet almost a week later, the family are still there: collecting Indian souvenirs, riding the Ferris Wheel and trying to promote the father’s insurance company.

The community spirit fostered in this event is as suitabilyconnected to the concept of celebrity as Tatum’s desire to maintain Leo’s struggle. By embarking on a journey to Escadero, the participants can claim their kinship with Leo, while failing to understand or appreciate his struggle. At the film’s finale, when travellers begin to cry their false tears represent a loss of the entertainment associated with this circus, rather than any pity for Leo. His plight is the catalyst for their journey, but not their reason for remaining longer than half an hour in an infertile area

It is in this barren state, that codes of morality disintegrate. Trapped and alone, Leo worries for “grieving” wife Lorraine. Yet, Lorraine is unmoved by Leo’s situation and only remains at her in-laws home in order to reap the financial benefits of the media circus and woo Tatum, as he spends boozy hours bartering contracts for his exclusive story. In Lorraine’s restaurant, the corrupt local sheriff brokers a partnership with Tatum for favourable sentiments in his articles: informing Tatum that the region’s only contractor owes his position to the sheriff’s baseless tactics. Meanwhile, as the media-hungry crowds outside begin to swell, Leo’s Hispanic parents and the local Native American tribe hold vigils and ceremonies for Leo. These attempts of goodness however are chastized by the racist and inept officers, as well as Lorraine who objects to Tatum’s insistence of going to a vigil/photo-op as “kneeling bags my nylons.” Thus, Wilder’s film becomes a critique of Western morality: prophetically showing a culture which kneels at the altar of celebrity and feeds off the rotting carcass of the human spirit for little more than fifteen minutes of fame.

One of the best American films from the 1950's

* Ace in the Hole is currently unavailable on DVD. Although Criterion is rumoured to be releasing a R1 edition in late 2007.

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque