Dirty rotten scoundrel

Dirty rotten scoundrel

Billy Wilder’s 1951 film “Ace in the Hole,” a scathing take on newspapering and the American appetite for sentimentality, does not have one soft or tender moment. It is too easy to blame the press for its stories about celebrity meltdowns, philandering preachers, corrupt politicians or boasting serial killers. Who loves those stories? We do. In this prescient and unsparing vision, Wilder made a movie that has only two good men and one is a victim of circumstance while the other is his doctor but no heroes. Instead of letting off the journalist who engineers a media circus, he indicts the sightseers who pay 25 cents admission. Nobody escapes.

The picture stars Kirk Douglas in what might be his meanest role; he could ice your veins if he wanted to (and did so often). He made comedies and played heroes, but sometimes he was just merciless his face curling into a sneer of disgust and contempt. Here he plays Charles Tatum, an alcoholic reporter with a past: He has been fired in 11 markets (libel, adultery, booze) when his car breaks down in Albuquerque and he talks himself into a job at the local paper.

That break comes exactly one year later: Sent to cover rattlesnakes at some hole-in-the-wall town’s annual festival it doesn’t matter where; they’re all interchangeable as far as Tatum is concerned he stops en route when he learns that the owner of an abandoned trading post has been trapped in an old silver mine by a cave-in. The rattlers can wait; Tatum sees this tunnel as his own path out of career purgatory: If I bust him outta there big story lotsa papers grab lotsa days milk it till I’m gooey back East!

Confronted by corrupt local authorities (the sheriff, his wife) and mining-company men who want to blow up the mountain, Tatum takes charge by sheer will, shouting orders and slapping deputies around with such swagger that he gets away with it. He learns that Minosa could be dug out in a day or two if workers shore up the tunnel and bring him out the same way they went in (that’s what she said). Tatum then cooks up a scheme to inflate the rescue time from 18 hours to five days: Vertical rescue! Rescuers will drill straight down through solid rock.

The newspaperman goes to Minosa’s trading post and starts giving orders. He discovers that the man’s wife, a former bar girl in Baltimore named Lorraine (Jan Sterling), has looted the cash register and plans to catch the next bus out of town. He slaps her hard and tells her she must stay to play the grieving spouse; he needs her for his story.The movie may be little seen it was first released by Paramount under a title no one wanted, “The Big Carnival,” then shelved for decades but it contains one of those famous hard-boiled movie lines everybody seems to have heard; ordered to attend a prayer service for her husband, Lorraine sneers, “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.”

Wilder (1906-2002) made “Ace in the Hole” right after “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), which had 11 Oscar nominations and won three. Known for his biting cynicism and hard edges in such masterpieces as “Double Indemnity” (1944) and “The Lost Weekend” (1945), he outdid himself with “Ace in the Hole.” The film’s savage portrait of an American media circus appalled critics and repelled audiences; it flopped on first release, failed again when, after winning European festivals, it was retitled “The Big Carnival,” and is now revered as a masterpiece.

There’s not a wasted shot in Wilder’s film, which is single-mindedly economical. Students of Arthur Schmidt’s editing could learn from the way every shot does its duty. There isn’t even a gratuitous reaction shot. The black-and-white cinematography by Charles Lang is inevitable; this story would curdle color.And notice how there’s no time for pointless exposition: A wire-service ticker turns up there, again without comment. A press tent goes up and speaks for itself.

The movie is 56 years old, but watching it again, I feel it hasn’t aged a day. That’s because Wilder and his co-writers, Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels, were so lean and mean. The dialogue delivers perfectly timed punches: “I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog.”

That’s what Tatum does with the Minosa story. Not content with the drama of a man trapped underground, he discovers that the mountain is an Indian burial ground and adds speculations about a mummy’s curse. Gawkers soon arrive from all over the country as do those who have arrived to exploit them: hot dog stands, cotton candy vendors, a carnival with a merry go round.

Meanwhile Minosa grows weaker; he depends on Tatum for his contact with the surface.T he pounding drill growing closer tortures him. Rival newsmen complain about Tatum’s role: He controls access to the rescue, the story and the wife. With every day that passes, the story grows bigger. And on this slow day he manufactures news. Tatum plunges into the cave with a priest and a doctor, learns from Leo about his present for his wife who despises him (a fur scarf).Tatum hands it to her and tells her to wear it. She hates it. He almost chokes her with it.She wears it.

Born in 1916, Kirk Douglas still is and always has been one hell of a competitor. No wonder one of his first screen roles was as a boxer in Champion (1949). When I interviewed him for Esquire in 1969, the idea of being a champion was at the core of his thoughts: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a nice guy or you’re a bastard. What matters is, you won’t bend!” His concentration and drive as Chuck Tatum are almost frightening. There is nothing dated about Douglas’ performance. It’s as right this minute as a sharpened knife.

Wildly he makes for money and fame, and if there’s ever a moment when we think he might take pity on Minosa, that’s just Wilder yanking our chains. The way he thinks about the trapped man just keeps changing in an interesting way what subtlety of direction, writing and acting! In another kind of movie Tatum would share our sympathy for the poor guy; here he’s on a parabola toward that but wants it to intersect with the moment of his own greatest fame.

Ace in the Hole has always been considered one of Wilder’s great films; its rejection by the marketplace is no surprise. Moviegoers like crime, like suspense, like violence — but they like happy endings; and Wilder is telling them to wake up and smell the coffee.

Wilder was born in Austria, fled Hitler; certainly became one of America’s greatest directors but never bought into the American dream; what he saw in Europe warned him off dreams. When this picture came out people complained bitterly about its portrait of news practices and standards even though it was inspired by a real media circus when Floyd Collins was trapped in that Kentucky cave. Today it is hard to imagine some segments of the press not recognizing their hunger for sensation; likewise with certain sectors of the public after the picture was over, the studio sold admissions to its mountain sets outside Gallup, New Mexico.

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