A Great Billy Wilder Title

Billy Wilder is one of my favorite directors. The man produced a body of work that reads like a laundry list of great films – The Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, Stalag 17, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment... Even the films that aren’t quite at that level – films like Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, The Spirit of St. Louis, and Witness for the Prosecution – have their genuine merits.

The man was amazing.

The following film, Ace in the Hole, was recently released on DVD by the Criterion Collection. The film is fantastic.

Ace in the Hole
In Ace in the Hole, Billy Wilder savagely satirizes everything from the news business to crooked cops to the tendency of people to gawk at tragedy and turn it into spectacle – that same unknowable something that makes a person slow down and stare at an accident on the freeway.

Wilder made this movie in 1951, right after completing Sunset Boulevard, and it qualifies as perhaps the angriest film he ever made. It stars Kirk Douglas in full gung-ho mode as a down on his luck journalist and one nasty, manipulative customer. Though famous, it seems to me that Douglas gets too little credit (in the broader public view, at any rate) for being as willing to take a professional risk as often as he did. He had good looks and he could be dashing when he chose to be. He could have played it safe and simply starred in heroic roles his entire career. He did play those roles, of course, and well, but he also consistently tried other types of parts (The Bad and the Beautiful, Lust for Life, Paths of Glory). Few people, for instance, could play cruelty and drive like he could. He practically tops himself in this picture.

Out of work and with his journalistic reputation essentially in the gutter, Charles Tatum (Douglas) talks his way into a job at a small town paper and soon proceeds to employ all manner of shoddy, shady ethics to beef up a story about a miner trapped underground, and in the process burnish his own beleaguered reputation. He colludes with the sheriff and rescue workers to keep the miner trapped in the hope of milking the story. In the process, the miner’s plight becomes a media circus, with thousands of people paying admission to camp out and watch this human tragedy unfold. In one particularly dark – and none too subtle – joke, a carnival run by a company called the S&M Amusement Corp. rumbles onto the scene.

The film was apparently too dark for 1951 audiences, and it flopped at the box office. It was ahead of its time – its critique of journalistic ethics and the human propensity for voyeurism seems more pertinent today than ever.