Ace In The Hole. (PG.)
Directed by Billy Wilder.
Starring Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Robert Arthur, Porter Hall, Ray Teal and Richard Benedict. 111 mins. 1951. Out on Blu-ray in Masters of Cinema series from Eureka.
Film critics and historians are very protective of flops made by their pet favourites. Few Hollywood directors have as impenetrable a critical reputation as Billy Wilder. Ace in The Hole is a fierce attack on journalistic ethics and his first flop, and though there’s lots to admire in it and Eureka are releasing it in their Masters of Cinema range, I can see why audiences in 1951 didn’t go for it. Its cynicism is so solid, so ingrained, it practically gleams; it is a blast of withering disdain that leaves nothing standing by the end.
“I’ve met a lot of cold blooded men in my life, but you … you’re twenty minutes,” says one character of Chuck Tatum (Douglas.) Tatum is $250 dollar a week newspaper man who is now selling himself for about a quarter of that at the local Albuquerque Sun paper. He is desperate to find the one big story that will get him out of there, back to the big time and, ideally, back to New York. After a year he stumbles on to what may be it – a man, Leo Minosa, stuck in a cave after a rock fall. It’s a big story but not quite big enough. So, with the connivance of an up-for-reelection sheriff, he contrives to build it up until it is, literally, a circus with people flooding in to witness the rescue effort.
Wilder was primarily a dialogue-in-rooms kind of director but this film saw him venture out on to location and there’s one particularly memorable shot in the film, that seems more suited to a John Ford western. It’s a panoramic view from the top of the mountain which Leo is buried beneath. The drilling crew are receiving cold drinks from Leo’s father and behind them on the ground below there are rows and rows of parked cars, amusement and food stalls and in the distance a train pulls up to unload more onlookers. Film Noir seems an absurd term to use about such a sun drenched movie where everything happens beneath the sun’s hot glare but such is the dark hearted villainy and snappy dialogue you can’t really avoid it.
Kirk Douglas is an unrelenting, unwavering performer who seemed to view anything less than full on as somehow sissy. You just can’t deny his bulldozer force though and Chuck Tatum is one of his very best. By this time he was already an Oscar nominated but the way he barrels and rattles his way through the film you’d think it was him who was washed up and this was his shot at a return to the big time.
Is it reassuring or shocking that journalism 60 years ago was just as venal and corrupt as it is today? The antics of Tatum are the equal of the Brooks, Coulmans and “Trigger” Mulcaires, while crucially their readers are every bit as gullible and shallow as the Twitteratti. The film is savage in its condemnations of journalistic ethics, but it is also a little bit in love with them. (Wilder started out in the newspaper business.) Tatum is introduced pulling up outside the newspaper offices in the front seat of a car being pulled by a tow truck. He is a caged tiger stuck in the backwaters. When the rest of the press turn up all in their little hats and suits they zing smart lines back and forth and charge up the room with their bustling energy. The film feed off their macho energy, the buzz of filing copy, hitting deadlines and the thrill of putting things out “on the wire.”
Extras.
Compared to most other Masters of Cinema discs, on this disc they go for depth rather than variety.
There is a half hour discussion of the film by film critic Neil Sinyard, who co-authored a book on Wilder, while the 40 page booklet contain an essay on the film that relates it to Wilder’s other films by Emmanuel Burdeau, the former editor-in-chief of the Cahiers du cinema.
The pick though is surely the documentary Portrait of a 60% Perfect Man, in which the director is engaged in a prickly conversation by French critic Michel Ciment. Hitchcock is said to have never recovered from being interviewed by Francois Truffaut but Wilder is not a man to have too much truck with Ciment intellectual posturing.
Directed by Billy Wilder.
Starring Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Robert Arthur, Porter Hall, Ray Teal and Richard Benedict. 111 mins. 1951. Out on Blu-ray in Masters of Cinema series from Eureka.
Film critics and historians are very protective of flops made by their pet favourites. Few Hollywood directors have as impenetrable a critical reputation as Billy Wilder. Ace in The Hole is a fierce attack on journalistic ethics and his first flop, and though there’s lots to admire in it and Eureka are releasing it in their Masters of Cinema range, I can see why audiences in 1951 didn’t go for it. Its cynicism is so solid, so ingrained, it practically gleams; it is a blast of withering disdain that leaves nothing standing by the end.
“I’ve met a lot of cold blooded men in my life, but you … you’re twenty minutes,” says one character of Chuck Tatum (Douglas.) Tatum is $250 dollar a week newspaper man who is now selling himself for about a quarter of that at the local Albuquerque Sun paper. He is desperate to find the one big story that will get him out of there, back to the big time and, ideally, back to New York. After a year he stumbles on to what may be it – a man, Leo Minosa, stuck in a cave after a rock fall. It’s a big story but not quite big enough. So, with the connivance of an up-for-reelection sheriff, he contrives to build it up until it is, literally, a circus with people flooding in to witness the rescue effort.
Wilder was primarily a dialogue-in-rooms kind of director but this film saw him venture out on to location and there’s one particularly memorable shot in the film, that seems more suited to a John Ford western. It’s a panoramic view from the top of the mountain which Leo is buried beneath. The drilling crew are receiving cold drinks from Leo’s father and behind them on the ground below there are rows and rows of parked cars, amusement and food stalls and in the distance a train pulls up to unload more onlookers. Film Noir seems an absurd term to use about such a sun drenched movie where everything happens beneath the sun’s hot glare but such is the dark hearted villainy and snappy dialogue you can’t really avoid it.
Kirk Douglas is an unrelenting, unwavering performer who seemed to view anything less than full on as somehow sissy. You just can’t deny his bulldozer force though and Chuck Tatum is one of his very best. By this time he was already an Oscar nominated but the way he barrels and rattles his way through the film you’d think it was him who was washed up and this was his shot at a return to the big time.
Is it reassuring or shocking that journalism 60 years ago was just as venal and corrupt as it is today? The antics of Tatum are the equal of the Brooks, Coulmans and “Trigger” Mulcaires, while crucially their readers are every bit as gullible and shallow as the Twitteratti. The film is savage in its condemnations of journalistic ethics, but it is also a little bit in love with them. (Wilder started out in the newspaper business.) Tatum is introduced pulling up outside the newspaper offices in the front seat of a car being pulled by a tow truck. He is a caged tiger stuck in the backwaters. When the rest of the press turn up all in their little hats and suits they zing smart lines back and forth and charge up the room with their bustling energy. The film feed off their macho energy, the buzz of filing copy, hitting deadlines and the thrill of putting things out “on the wire.”
Extras.
Compared to most other Masters of Cinema discs, on this disc they go for depth rather than variety.
There is a half hour discussion of the film by film critic Neil Sinyard, who co-authored a book on Wilder, while the 40 page booklet contain an essay on the film that relates it to Wilder’s other films by Emmanuel Burdeau, the former editor-in-chief of the Cahiers du cinema.
The pick though is surely the documentary Portrait of a 60% Perfect Man, in which the director is engaged in a prickly conversation by French critic Michel Ciment. Hitchcock is said to have never recovered from being interviewed by Francois Truffaut but Wilder is not a man to have too much truck with Ciment intellectual posturing.
