Billy Wilder (1951)
Billy Wilder made Ace in the Hole immediately after Sunset Boulevard. That film did for Hollywood; Ace in the Hole does for the press and broadcast news, and the public that partakes of them. There are jabs along the way at self-serving politicians too. Some of these targets were familiar from recent Preston Sturges films but the satire is packaged very differently, and often more surprisingly, in Sturges. Ace in the Hole‘s misanthropic message is delivered, like that of Sunset Boulevard, in a lugubrious, hard-edged style, once the story is underway. That implies a different style before then and the opening sequences of Ace in the Hole are certainly the best. Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) marches into the becalmed offices of a New Mexico provincial paper, the ‘Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin’. Tatum tells the owner and editor, Jacob Q Boot (Porter Hall), that he – Tatum – is exactly what the paper needs. The calmly principled Mr Boot doesn’t necessarily agree but gives him a job anyway. A year later, Tatum is still working there and verging on stir crazy. The framed sampler on the office wall – its motto, ‘Tell the Truth’, embroidered by genteel Miss Deverich (Edith Evanson), the paper‘s household-hints columnist – epitomises all that Tatum despises, and is exasperated by, at the Sun-Bulletin. But within a couple of days, he has stumbled across a scoop that he doesn’t intend to let go.
Chuck Tatum has worked his way down the professional ladder, on a journey that’s taken him from New York to New Mexico. He’s been fired from a succession of newspapers for a variety of reasons – libel suits, adultery with the editor’s wife, drink problem – but his desperation for any kind of job appears only to have sharpened his ambition and self-confidence. Tatum is dismayed by his latest assignment for the Sun-Bulletin – he’s sent to cover a rattlesnake hunt, accompanied by the paper’s naïve young photographer, Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur). En route, they stop at a store-cum-diner-cum-trading-post that advertises Indian curios. (Its ominous appearance gives it a strange kinship with Norma Desmond’s mansion.) Tatum and Herbie find in a room behind the bar a woman deep in prayer. Mama Minosa (Frances Dominguez) is asking for the deliverance of her son Leo, who helps run the family business. He is trapped underground, following a rockfall in nearby caves, where he was collecting Native American artefacts. Tatum seizes his opportunity. He and Herbie go to the caves to interview and photograph the stricken Leo (Richard Benedict). Tatum then does everything he can to prolong Leo’s agony, and keep the story of his plight on front pages and in news bulletins across the country.
Tatum has some willing accomplices. The greenhorn Herbie soon forgets the journalistic ethics that Mr Boot taught him and is smitten instead with ideas of selling his photographs of Leo to Life. Leo’s sullen, bored wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) despises her husband and wants out of life in the middle of nowhere but she’s willing to postpone her departure, once a press pack and tourists descend on the site of the accident and start spending money in the Minosas’ bar. Lorraine is also happy to stay put for as long as Tatum is around: she fancies him though he treats her rough. The local sheriff (Ray Teal), who’s running for re-election, likes the idea of making a name for the place. On Tatum’s suggestion, Sheriff Kretzer puts pressure on Sam Smollett (Frank Jaquet), the contractor supervising rescue attempts, to drill into the caves from above instead of from the side – as a result, the rate of progress down to Leo is painfully slow. Within a short space of time, the land round the caves has become a grotesque, ghoulish holiday venue, with fun for all the family. (The film was renamed The Big Carnival by Paramount shortly before its release. It regained its original title some years later.)
We watch and listen to Tatum, after a whole year’s stagnation at the Albuquerque paper, fulminating about its piddling ambition and his own talents going to waste. His colleagues don’t react much, although you feel he would long ago have become a barely tolerated office bore: it’s not before time, from everyone’s point of view (including the audience’s), when his scoop materialises. From this point onwards, however, the plotting of the story – Wilder wrote the screenplay with Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman – is remarkably unsurprising, and the same goes for Kirk Douglas’s performance. He makes a fine initial entrance. On his way into the Sun-Bulletin offices, Tatum exchanges a few words with a blue-collar worker; the man addresses him as ‘sir’; but Douglas, a moment after he’s walked past him, does a little double-take, as if to indicate Tatum’s displeasure that he hasn’t been acknowledged as much as he deserves. The opening pitch to Mr Boot is entertaining but Douglas is soon and increasingly hard to take. He gets his teeth into the role of Tatum in such an aggressive, condemnatory way that there are moments when you feel sorry for the anti-hero: the character is being savaged by the actor playing him.
It’s a pity Billy Wilder didn’t extend to casting of the lead the carry-on-Sunset–Boulevard aspect of Ace in the Hole. William Holden might have brought some shadings to Chuck Tatum – Kirk Douglas puts on a hyperkinetic show but there’s no development of the character until Tatum tries, too late, to get Smollett to revert to the quicker procedure for reaching the doomed Leo. The journalist’s outburst of bitter, snarling self-reproach is an instance of seeing the light Hollywood-style: here Wilder adds – one assumes inadvertently – to the satire of the movie world he launched in Sunset Boulevard. The ending of Ace in the Hole has a curious resonance too with that of Champion, which I’d seen two days earlier (both films are part of BFI’s season to celebrate Kirk Douglas’s imminent hundredth birthday). In neither movie do you feel the protagonist, bad as he is, deserves to die. In both movies, the melodramatic finale enables Kirk Douglas to go out with the bang he’s been straining to achieve all the way through.
Jan Sterling gives Lorraine a distinctive disgruntled sultriness although the character is one-dimensional. Porter Hall is very good, at least for as long as Mr Boot’s honourableness is conveyed in a droll register. Boot’s later switch to more righteous dismay at what Tatum and Herbie are up to, makes him one of the few people in the story presented as acting from motives other than base ones. The other exceptions include the humble Minosa parents (John Berkes is Papa), the priest (Lester Dorr) who delivers the last rites to Leo, and sundry Native Americans in bit parts: Billy Wilder’s exemption of these ‘simple’ folk is condescending. His command of the enlarging scale of the media and other circuses setting up in the New Mexican desert is impressive but only in a technical sense. The point Wilder is making in Ace in the Hole – it is essentially just the one point – has already been repeated ad nauseam.
6 September 2016
