Ace in the Hole - Criterion Collection (1951)

Bad news sells best.

Ignored, unappreciated, even despised by the majority upon its initial release, Ace in the Hole is a bold social critique that pulls no punches. This movie holds up the public mirror and tries to make people see just how much they suck.
Kirk Douglas delivers another fearless performance as Charles Tatum, a shameless big-city reporter that has been exiled from several lucrative jobs. So he retreats to a small town newspaper gig in New Mexico, in order to reestablish his career.
Tatum hates his new job, and desperately searches for the big break that will propel him back into the limelight. That moment eventually comes when a mine collapses, trapping a worker inside. Tatum takes charge of all the relief efforts, not out of concern for the desperate man inside, but for the fame that accompanies this tragedy. A media frenzy ensues.
One moment that illustrates Tatum's arrogance--other reporters try to move in and capture some of the news coverage. One says "We're all in the same boat". Tatum's cynical response was "No, I'm in the boat. You're in the water."
This movie is an excellent display of humanity's overall decline of morality. How vanity supersedes compassion. How humanity has lost touch with one another. I'm not trying to sound judgemental, heck I'm ignoring all company policies and personal job responsibilities by writing this review. Nobody's perfect. But this is a great movie, with powerful but controlled acting and a significant message.
So now, go hug a stranger. No, on second thought you better not. You'll probably get punched.
February 11, 2008

True Movie Geeks Rejoice!

I bought this DVD for my boyfriend for a Christmas present with my fingers crossed. It's impossible to describe how movie-centric he is... we've chosen vacation destinations based on movies. It was a HUGE hit! He's watched all of the extras at least once now, and he loved the creative way Criterion made the front insert look like an old newspaper. It's gritty, ahead of it's time, and Kirk Douglas is a true star! Criterion wins again (as if anyone thought it'd be otherwise!). January 13, 2008

Easily one of the best movies I saw this year.

Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951)

Thank heaven (or Criterion) for a release of Billy Wilder's notorious and brilliant Ace in the Hole for the home video market. As topical as it may have been fifty-six years ago, today it has an unprecedented relevance to American society. It's rare that a film's importance grows over time. This is one of those cases.

The story centers around Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas in the performance of his career), a disgraced newspaper reporter who finds himself working in the backwoods world of Albuquerque journalism, covering compelling news stories like a rattlesnake contest. While on his way to cover one such story with cub photographer Herbie Cook (Green Grass of Wyoming's Robert Arthur), he stumbles into something much bigger: Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), who owns a service station/knickknack shop in the dusty little town of Los Barios, has gotten himself trapped in a mine collapse while looking for Indian relics in a cliff dwelling to sell to tourists. Rather than simply helping the guy out, getting one story, and going on with his life, Tatum-- desperate to get back in the good graces of the Eastern papers with a strong series of stories-- concocts a plan with the corrupt local Sheriff (Ray Teal) to keep the story alive for a week. In the process, he manipulates everyone around him, including Leo's cynical yet naïve wife (Jan Sterling).

Wilder takes the idea of the media circus to new heights here (including having an actual circus on the grounds during the latter half of the film). Ace in the Hole is a relentlessly pessimistic film in which no one cares about Leo Minosa the human being, only about Leo Minosa the story and what each person can get out of it. Leo's wife wants a way out of hicksville, as does Tatum (and, to a lesser extent, Herbie); the sheriff wants re-elected; the head engineer of the rescue team wants an exclusive on the fat contracts that come with the sheriff's re-election; even the competing papers' journalists, who are the only people in the film kinda-sorta set up as the good guys, just want the story, and their editors eventually want Tatum. After a while, news stops being news and starts being entertainment. (Note that Wilder has no illusions about this from the get-go; the first story Tatum files has less to do with Leo Minosa than the Indian curse that Minosa believes trapped him in the shaft.) This, of course, is exactly what's been happening to American culture since not long after Watergate.

Topicality, though, is not the only reason to watch Ace in the Hole. Wilder was one of those great directors, now an endangered species, who could do anything (and often did); the melodramatic Ace in the Hole was bookended by Sunset Blvd., the finest piece of film noir of all time, and Stalag 17, the movie that (loosely) formed the basis of the television show Hogan's Heroes. Imagine a modern director filming three so widely differing movies in a row, not to mention having all three of the movies, fifty years later, being known as timeless classics of filmdom. Wilder got the most out of every actor he ever cast in a movie, and knew where to put the cameras and how to film the shots so that all that acting talent could be showcased in the finest possible way. A Billy Wilder movie is filmmaking at its best, and Ace in the Hole, finally available again after languishing in obscurity so long, is ample evidence of that. **** ½
December 20, 2007

A great film with a major flaw!

Ace In The Hole (aka The Big Carnival) was directed by my hero, Billy Wilder. He is the genius who gave us Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot - three of my all-time favorite films. Ace In The Hole, however, suffers from the over-the-top performance of Kirk Douglas who manages to play every scene with clenched teeth and boiling-point anger. His early scenes in the small newspaper office in Albuquerque are so over-played that he comes off like a man in need of a straight-jacket rather than a job. I believe it would be a more powerful film if his character were a little more sympatetic initially, thereby shocking us once his dark side is fully revealed. As it stands now, we are not surprised at the depth of his depravity because of Douglas' inability to bring some subtlety to his performance. Having said all that, there is much here to recommend...some solid acting performances and a powerful story of greed and power and how contagious corruption is. Jan Sterling stands out as the cold and indifferent wife of the man trapped in the cave. She delivers the only funny line in the movie, "I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." She can be seen in Caged and in her Oscar-nominated performance in The High And The Mighty. In closing, I would like to say that I think William Holden would have brought more subtley and dimension to the lead role. However, it is what it is and I my hope is that this review has peaked your curiosity and you will watch the film and decide for yourself. December 9, 2007

Billy Wilder makes us squirm, and Ace in the Hole makes it worthwhile: It's an excellent film

"Don't worry, Leo. I'm your pal." That's Chuck Tatum speaking. He's a hot-shot big city reporter who has been fired from every top paper he's ever worked for. Now he's hit bottom. He works for the Albuquerque Sun=Bulletin, a small town daily which puts yard sales on its front page. Tatum needs the job, but he's determined to find that one big ticket story that'll put him back in New York. The man he's talking to is going to be that big ticket. His name is Leo Mimosa, owner of the desolate, dusty Mimosa's Indian Curios ("Gas and Oil, Drinks on Ice") in Escudero, in New Mexico's high desert. Leo is currently 300 feet underground, trapped in a cave-in while looking for ancient Indian pots he can sell for a few hundred dollars. In the next 111 minutes, covering five or so days, we're going to experience so much corruption of the soul, misplaced trust and consuming ambition...leavened by so little humanity...that we'll want to take a bath afterwards. This is one of director Billy Wilder's greatest pictures. For me, it's permeated not by Wilder's famously sardonic outlook toward humanity but by the inevitability of commonplace tragedy. That there are only one or two people we might think well of isn't so much a limitation as an element that sharpens the fascination with great story-telling combined with vivid acting.

While Tatum controls his big story, and while Leo becomes increasingly desperate, to the point of believing Tatum is his only friend, we encounter a cast of characters who are either stupid and venal or sly and venal. Top of the list is Tatum, himself. Kirk Douglas gives an utterly believable portrait of a man, excellent at his job, who can taste the big-time again and is determined to do whatever it takes to achieve it. "I'm on my way back to the top," he says, "and if it takes a deal with a crooked sheriff, that's alright with me! And if I have to fancy it up with an Indian curse and a broken hearted wife for Leo, then that's alright too!" Close behind is Jan Sterling as Leo Mimosa's wife. Lorraine Mimosa wants out...out of Escudero, out of New Mexico and out of her marriage with Leo. She's a pouty bleached blonde, callous and discontented. Gus Kretzer, the local sheriff, is corrupt and more than willing to work with Tatum to insure he gets the kind of news coverage he needs for his re-election. And there are all those visitors to the cave where Leo is trapped...gawkers, thrill seekers, whole families out to set up camp and see what happens. Food booths and a carnival keep them contented while a drill pounds away at the rock to reach Leo. It's the slow way which Tatum has maneuvered to insure his exclusive coverage of Leo's predicament can play out over the next few days. Leo literally is Tatum's ace in the hole. The conclusion is as depressing as Wilder's depiction of human character. The movie's whole set-up, in fact, is designed to make us feel uncomfortable at what we're seeing. If we've ever slowed down to get a better view of a traffic accident, if we've ever watched with fascinated revulsion as a snake swallows down a live mouse or a mantis gnaws at a struggling lizard, we have to recognize that in spirit we're also part of the crowd eager to see what happens.

What makes the movie stand apart from so much of Wilder's skilled cynicism in some of his other films, I think, are two elements. First, Wilder plays this story straight. There's no sardonic comedy or witty, misogynistic lines. He serves us up a serious, well-acted drama and then compels us to take it seriously while he makes us squirm a little. Second, he includes two characters that give us some relief from Tatum's ambition and our own unease. First is Herbie Cook, played by Robert Arthur, the young photographer from the newspaper. Herbie is a graduate of a journalism school, a little naive and so innocent-looking you want to protect him from Tatum's manipulations. Second, and most important, is Jacob Boot, played by that fine character actor, Porter Hall. Boot is in some ways our conscience, the serious, realistic publisher and owner of the Sun=Bulletin who has the quaint idea that telling the truth is important. Boot is able, although not by much, to show us that people come in all flavors, and that venality is only one of them, no more or less than trying to do the right thing also is. In Ace in the Hole, however, nothing good happens in time. As Tatum said earlier, "It's a good story today. Tomorrow, they'll wrap a fish in it." Same with people.

Some call Ace in the Hole a noir. I'm not one of them. For me, it's a powerful drama, and it transcends genre classification. We might as well call Macbeth a noir simply because Macbeth has a tragic hero, a femme fatale, death and the inevitability of fate. The two-disc Criterion release features an excellent black-and-white picture transfer and several extras which include interviews with Kirk Douglas, Billy Wilder and screenwriter Walter Newman. There is an audio commentary by Neil Sinyard, identified as a film scholar. Amusingly, the booklet insert which has essays by Molly Haskell and Guy Madden is in the form of an edition of the Albuquerque Sun=Bulletin. November 3, 2007

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