The Definitives
Ace in the Hole (1951)
Director: Billy Wilder
Cast: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Porter Hall, Richard Benedict, and Robert Arthur
Rated: Not Rated
Runtime: 111 min.
by Brian Eggert
Entered into
The Definitives:
07/17/2007
Original Release Date:
06/29/1951
Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole appeared in 1951 and vanished without a trace in one swift motion, disregarded by critics and audiences as sneering and irredeemable cynicism. Representing an artistic zenith within Wilder’s career, where his satirist sensibilities and affinity for noirish narratives converge into biting commentary, the picture’s nonconformity and unrelenting pessimism prove alarming when compared to the filmmaker’s more popularized string of successes.
Being a Jew of Austrian-Hungarian decent, Wilder fled Hitler’s oncoming rein in the late 1930s, leaving Paris for the United States. After his arrival, his European motion picture experience landed him as a Hollywood screenwriter, where he collaborated with writing partner Charles Bracket on a number of popular films; their early hits include Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka and the Howard Hawks screwball comedy Ball of Fire. He soon petitioned Paramount Pictures to allow him to write and direct his own film exclusively, and based on the impressive successes of Hollywood’s first comedic writer-director Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels), Wilder was given his chance.
While German filmmakers were best known for their blatant expressionism, Wilder surprised Paramount studio heads in 1942 when his blithe and commercial debut The Major and the Minor turned out to be a box-office success. It was completely void of any unmarketable German-ness so well known in Hollywood from directors like Fritz Lang, as Wilder intentionally set out to make a commercial crowd-pleaser, if only to prove to studio heads that could be commercially viable so that later the formula could change.
Established as commercially viable, Wilder would go on to helm innumerable benchmark pictures, many of them shifting away from outright commercial appeal and delving into much more unconventional material. Double Indemnity, The Long Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard each garnered accolades for their chiaroscuro lighting and gravitas-laden themes. However, the majority of his output remained comedies like Irma La Douce, One, Two, Three, and Some Like it Hot, but each winks to the audience by testing the boundaries of orthodoxy. A Foreign Affair, for example, is somehow a romantic comedy, despite its setting in the otherwise humorless Nazi-occupied Berlin His movies were best known for their irony and unconventional settings, for their light lampooning and harsh criticism of established norms. Wilder was an incredible dramatist, a superb romantic, but foremost a satirist.
Wilder based Ace in the Hole on a real-life event from 1925, when reporter William Burke Miller kept miner W. Floyd Collins buried and trapped inside Sand Cave in Kentucky until his death, just for the story’s sensationalism. Wilder captures the cynical nature of that truth by exploring the reporter himself. After breaking with longtime colleague Bracket for reasons best left to Hollywood rumor, Wilder partnered with Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels to tell Collins’ story. Victor Desney, an actor who had approached Wilder with the concept two years earlier, discovered Collins’ story was in production at Paramount and filed a lawsuit. Though writers changed the names and locations for the script, courts ruled for Desney, who settled for a hearty sum.
Dubbed Charles Tatum and played with intense bravado by Kirk Douglas, journalist William Burke Miller was surely exaggerated, as Tatum personified a charismatic, megalomaniac personality. The story begins with Tatum, a hard-luck newspaper writer who talks loud, thinks fast, and belongs somewhere in a city scouring slums and politicians’ bedrooms for a story. “I can handle big news and little news,” says Tatum. “And if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog.” Nevertheless, no city will have him. He’s been fired from eleven newspapers around the country for reasons ranging from drinking on the job to sleeping with the editor’s wife. His former salaries were more than anyone in Albuquerque, where he finds himself when the film begins, has ever come close to earning.
Casing the offices of the local paper, Tatum speaks with as much modesty as you will see from him—he tells the owner that taking him on will make the paper $200 a week, as he is a $250 writer willing to take the job for $50. Once hired, even a year later, Tatum still lights matches off typewriter recoils, scoffs at the paper’s embroidered “Tell the Truth” motto, and talks of his New York City glory days as if there were still a chance... All the while he waits for a big fish to come along, onto which he will surely snag his hook and pull him out of his dinky Albuquerque boat, into the river and down all the way to New York City once again.
Beginning to feel that biding his time in New Mexico’s empty pasture of newspaper journalism might be his last mistake, Tatum sees a way back into The Big Time when driving to a rattlesnake festival. At a wayside trading post and restaurant, Tatum and his gopher photographer discover that the store’s owner, while digging for artifacts to sell, was trapped inside a centuries-old Native American cave system. Remembering a journalist who years ago won a Pulitzer for dragging out such a story to its full dramatic scope (likely an in-film reference to Miller), Tatum sees the predicament of Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), the pleasant store owner and war vet who remains trapped in a tiny opening, as the perfect opportunity. Tatum explains, “Bad news sells best. ‘Cause good news is no news.” As with other Wilder protagonists, Tatum takes the low road to raise himself up, selling himself for concept of personal accomplishment, not yet realizing the consequences until he ends up dead—a reoccurring theme in Wilder’s films since Double Indemnity.
Tatum takes control of the rescue operation, out-talking even the local police; he even bribes the sheriff with the idea of reelection and noted fame from newspaper coverage. A contractor familiar with cave rescues wants to fasten the unstable walls with bearings, which should allow Minosa’s rescue in half a day. Too dangerous, Tatum explains, perhaps we should use a drill and go in through the top of the mountain—a decision that will extend Tatum’s newspaper treatment by days, by then gaining the attention of New York City’s high-brow journalists.
And then there is Minosa’s wife, Lorraine, played by the appropriately desperate and tired-looking Jan Sterling, who seems none-too-broken up about her husband’s pickle. Tatum’s newspaper articles attract attention; tourists stop by just to get a look at the cave where hero Leo Minosa remains trapped. Meanwhile, those same tourists are buying burgers at the trading post, giving Mrs. Minosa more business than she has had in, well, ever.
Eventually, Lorraine comes on to Tatum, hoping that he can wisp her away from her isolation, off to The Big City when Mr. Minosa is rescued. Through a few subtle glances, we realize Mrs. Minosa knows just what Tatum is up to. “That's the first grand I've ever had,” she says to him after a good day of business, smiling with sexual conviction. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” Tatum instructs her to get that smile off her face, that she has the part of a distraught wife to play. “Why don’t you make me?” she says. Tatum slaps her hard across each cheek and her smile is replaced with angry confusion. "Don't wipe those tears," he says. "That's the way you're supposed to look." It is a vicious, scary moment in the film, one where we realize how cruel Tatum truly is, and how breathtaking an actor Kirk Douglas could be.
Compare Douglas’ Tatum to his character Jim McLeod in William Wyler’s Detective Story. Both characters are driven, self-aware, and conscious of their own moral downfalls. McLeod resorts to criminality to put criminals away; Tatum creates his own stories for journalistic purposes. Douglas excels in these roles, both powerful, flawed men. Their brash sensibilities are subdued only by Douglas’ natural, charming confidence. And while each character may be anti-heroic, to the point where we know they must die in the end to amend their misdeeds, we root for them, as they are uniquely sympathetic.
By the time the drill is set up on top of the mountain, Lorraine is selling tickets to her husband’s entrapment, even letting the circus erect tents, sell concessions, and sing songs about rescuing Leo—giving a very literal meaning to “media circus”. Flourishing under such conditions, Tatum juggles prearranging a job contract with a New York newspaper, keeping quiet those who know his secrets, communicating with Leo and instilling in him hope, and maintaining order in the newly constructed “community” just outside the cave.
Wilder’s disparaging ending leaves both Leo and Tatum dead. “I'm a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman,” Tatum tells his idealistic Albuquerque editor. “You can have me for nothing.” Tatum falls to the ground, lifeless from a stab wound incurred by the rejected Lorraine. After all his efforts, Tatum could not assure than Minosa would live the week needed to once again boost his name. Leo dies in the cave needlessly. Lorraine is left pathetically clinging to her profits. When the circus finds out Leo is dead, collective heads drop in sadness; within moments the makeshift parking lot is abandoned and only scattered garbage remains. Tatum failed to secure a human interest ending to his human interest story; had Leo survived, perhaps Tatum would have lived in the end. But that would be another film entirely.
As with so much modern media, Tatum decides what his readers know and where the story goes. His reports on and develops his yarn in the manner to which he desires. Television and newspaper journalists choose what they report; this is a subjective process, as opposed the ideal objectivity professional journalists have forever yearned for but rarely achieve. Tatum simply takes subjectivity to the next level: interaction. While Ace in the Hole may seem satirical with Tatum pulling the locals’ strings like a puppeteer, reconsider the film’s basis in fact, that such events actually occurred to an extent. In some instances, they still occur today. Most recently in 1998, Steven Glass was fired from The New Republic magazine for fabricating entire stories. Names, places, events—all made-up. This is, of course, the next extension beyond what Tatum does in the film. And luckily, no one died from Glass’ actions; moreover, since there is no law against bad journalism, Glass was never punished.
But like any great film noir, the criminal hero, in this case Tatum, is punished in the end for his wrongdoings, lending to a sense of karmic justice, a narrative archetype that Wilder all but established with Double Indemnity. Though Ace in the Hole is not, for the most part, shot in the visual expressionism of the noir style, its plot conforms to traditional noirish devices—complete with an equally corrupt blonde bombshell to parallel the anti-hero. Only in the final scene, as Tatum collapses to the ground, forward so that he lands but a breath from the camera, do we see Wilder’s noir intent. Douglas’ visage is barely lit but for a highlighted cheekbone and lower eyelid, so near we cannot help but confront the reality of Tatum's death.
Perhaps this film's cynicism explains its failed business in America, where critics found Wilder’s pessimistic attitude toward the unlikely chances of credible journalism offensive. Furthermore, the film illustrates general human corruption, since every main character, save for Leo, is bought by Tatum’s charm. Audiences, like critics, ignored it. Curious that Paramount even allowed such a powerfully overcast film to be made, believing audiences in 1951 were willing to accept such material, or at least in their director. Even today, Ace in the Hole offers moments of emotions and character developments that are shocking in their blatant corruption. The comparatively raw audiences of 1951 were not used to seeing such barefaced gloom depicted onscreen, unless film noir was their genre.
While earning accolades in Europe, the picture was all but forgotten shortly thereafter until a recent revival. Poor receipts in North America panicked Paramount executives, who changed the title to “The Big Parade” briefly—a change that did little to increase attention to this sour-flavored picture. In Europe, which at the time was blossoming with some of the best in filmic auteurism, Ace in the Hole was widely regarded as a masterpiece. And because Paramount’s next Wilder movie, Stalag 17, was a huge success both commercially and artistically, Wilder’s salary for that film was purportedly withheld by Paramount to make up for this film’s massive losses.
Years later, Ace in the Hole was almost universally forgotten, seen only occasionally on television. Not until the recently rediscovered by The Criterion Collection has Wilder’s picture received home video release, as well as newfound adoration and appreciation for the director’s landmark satire. It subsists as one of the most important, forgotten, now rediscovered, unconventional films from yesteryear. Lost to time and further eclipsed by the landmark productivity of Wilder and star Douglas, the picture’s cutting-edge criticism of journalistic integrity, or lack thereof in the contemporary media, appears once more in the radar of North American film scholars, presenting perhaps the most scathing sample from Wilder’s career of hard-biting satires and darkly comic ironies.