ACE IN THE HOLE

by Kevin Koehler

"Mr. Boot, I'm a two-hundred and fifty dollars a week newspaper man.  I could be had for fifty.  I know newspapers backwards, forwards, and sideways.  I can write'em, edit'em, print'em, wrap'em, and sell'em.  I can handle big news and little news.  And if there's no news, I'll got out and bite a dog.

Make it forty-five."

- Charles "Chuck" Tatum, Ace in the Hole

As a filmmaker, the problem with being ahead of your time is that most audiences/critics/quasi-Luddites won't like your movie.  Certainly not at the time of its release, after which it will be relegated to the dustbin of celluloid history; there they await rescue by a new generation of pretentious cinephiles who like to impress friends by resurrecting forgotten classics.  Unless, Mister Director, all surviving negatives of your masterpiece are incinerated in a storage vault fire, in which case you're fucked.

Paramount has done a superior job of keeping lit cigarette butts and exposed electrical wires away from its flammable film stock than studio compatriots Fox and MGM, so Ace in the Hole survives.  This, despite generations of relative obscurity, surfacing from time to time on late-night television under assumed name The Big Carnival (Paramount renamed the picture in a desperate attempt to increase theatrical revenue).  Finally, more than fifty years after its release, Ace in the Hole can be rightly considered alongside Billy Wilder's other, more renown tours de force.  As great a film as it is, its recognition does come with some sadness.  You see, there's another problem with being ahead of your time: your satirical, cynical predictions actually come true.

The Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin can't plead ignorance in regards to their new hire, big-city beat reporter Charlie "Chuck" Tatum (Kirk Douglas, in what might be his best performance).  He tells them, in unflattering terms, exactly who he is - an unscrupulous newshawk who daydreams of plague and pestilence.  Of marauding rattlesnakes set loose on an unsuspecting community.  Of panicked town folk barricaded in their homes while one intrepid journalist relays the chaos unfolding just outside the door.  Anything that will propel him back into the major markets.  "Bad news sells best.  Because good news is no news."

There must be a lot of good news in Albuquerque - Chuck Tatum thought he'd be there a month, two at most.  But a year later he still finds himself in his prison of the banal, covering soap box derbies and pie-eating contests.  "Where's that loaf of bread with a file in it?  Where's that big story to get me out of here?"  Three hours outside of Albuquerque, as luck would have it, inside the Mountain of the Seven Vultures.  Tatum and his worshipful young photographer, Herbie (Robert Arthur), are lucky enough to arrive there just as a tunnel collapses on amateur spelunker/treasure hunter Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict).  Taking his colleague's camera, Chuck crawls inside and finds Minosa, alive, trapped under a pile of rocks.   He raises the camera but the prone man stops him.  "Let me wipe my face first."

Tatum's precious big story is born, even if it needs his own helpful push; he's seen a way out, not for Leo Minosa but for himself.  "Everyone likes a break" he tells Herbie.  "We didn't make it happen."  He repeats the sentiment in various forms, the incantation of an individual who is either uniquely self-deluded or unconscionable - the one thing that stands between he and the abyss.  "I don't make things happen.  All I do is write about them."  It may be his mantra, but it is not his creed.  Moments later, he brags of his ability to decide elections and influence world events.  What's important is The Story; if reality doesn't match Chuck Tatum's prized copy, than reality will have to change.

And change it does.  Chuck conspires with the corrupt local sheriff (Ray Teal) to delay Minosa's rescue effort in order to sell more papers, the process fashioning himself as the trapped man's savior.  A new town of interlopers and attention-seekers springs up around the human drama no one can see (Tatum's editor doubts there even is a man in the mountain), complete with carnival and amusements for those bored while waiting for a man to die.  But even those who watch must play a role, including Minosa's wandering-eye of a wife (Jan Sterling).  After all, theater has an audience, not just a stage, and with rotten fruit or applause they can determine the outcome undetermined.  We can all be performers in the world's circus tent.

In 1951, Wilder's perception of the media - that its members are not simply passive observers to objective events - amounted to theater of the absurd.  Take Bosley Crowther, esteemed film critic for the nation's paper of record, who opined "Mr. Wilder has let imagination so fully take command of his yarn that it presents not only a distortion of journalistic practice but something of a dramatic grotesque" (Crowther also dismissed Bonnie and Clyde as "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie").  He can be forgiven for lacking the foreknowledge of future events, the democratization of information, death of authority figures (including our enlightened gatekeepers), and so on.  He can also be forgiven for being a cog in the media establishment Wilder so incisively satirizes, a faceless entity for whom all good days are bad days, perception is reality, and fifty rattlesnakes terrorizing Albuquerque is cause to celebrate.

Interesting footnote: Ace in the Hole is loosely-based on the final days of William Floyd Collins, who was trapped in a Kentucky cave for two weeks, pinned underneath a fallen rock.  The rescue attempt became a media sensation (generally considered the third biggest story of the interwar period behind the Lindbergh flight and the Lindbergh kidnapping).  By the time they got to Collins, it was too late - he'd been dead of starvation and exposure for days.  His body was left there two months until it could be safely removed.  Collins would be displayed in a glass-topped coffin for years prior to being stolen by grave-robbers; the corpse was ultimately retrieved, but with the left leg missing.  It wasn't until 1989 that Collins' body was finally buried under ground in a cemetery.  The leg was never found.

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.