The Great Movies III

here's not a soft or sentimental passage in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (i a portrait of rotten journalism and the public's insatiable appetite for it. It's easy to blame the press for its portraits of self-destructing celebrities, philandering preachers, corrupt politicians, or bragging serial killers, but who loves those stories? The public does. Wilder, true to this vision and ahead of his time, made a movie in which the only good men are the victim and his doctor. Instead of blaming the journalist who masterminds a media circus, he is equally hard on sightseers who pay twentyfive cents admission. Nobody gets off the hook here. The movie stars Kirk Douglas, an actor who could freeze the blood when he wanted to, in his most savage role. Yes, he made comedies and played heroes, but he could be merciless, his face curling into scorn and bitterness. He plays Charles Tatum, a skilled reporter with a drinking problem, who has been fired in eleven markets (slander, adultery, boozing) when his car breaks down in Albuquerque and he cons his way into a job at the local paper.

The break he's waiting for comes a year later. Dispatched to a remote town to cover a rattlesnake competition, he stops in a desert hamlet and discovers that the owner of the trading post has been trapped in an abandoned silver mine by a cave-in. Tatum forgets the rattlesnakes and talks his way into the tunnel to talk to Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), whose legs are pinned under timbers. When Tatum comes out again, he sees the future: he will nail down possession of the story, spin it out as long as he can, and milk it for money, fame, and his old job back East.

Confronted by a corrupt local sheriff and mining experts, Tatum takes charge by force of will, issuing orders and slapping around deputies with so much confidence he gets away with it. Learning that Minosa could be rescued in a day or two if workers simply shored up the mine tunnel and brought him out, Tatum cooks up a cockamamie scheme to lengthen the process: rescuers will drill straight down to the trapped man, through solid rock.

The newspaperman moves into Minosa's trading post and starts issuing orders. He finds that the man's wife, a onetime Baltimore bar girl named Lorraine (Jan Sterling), has raided the cash register and plans to take the next bus out of town. He slaps her hard, and orders her to stay and portray a grieving spouse. He needs her for his story. Even though the film has been little seen and appeared for the first time on home video only last month, it produced one of those famous hardboiled 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 (1906-2oo2) came to Ace in the Hole right after Sunset Boulevard (1950), which had eleven 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 harsh portrait of an American media circus appalled the critics and repelled the public; it failed on first release, and after it won European festivals and was retitled The Big Carnival, it failed again.

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's not even a gratuitous reaction shot. The blackand-white cinematography by Charles Lang is the inevitable choice; this story would curdle color. And notice how no time is wasted with needless exposition. A wire-service ticker turns up near the mine, without comment. A press tent goes up and speaks for itself

Although the film is fifty-six years old, I found while watching it again that it still has all its power. It hasn't aged because Wilder and his cowriters, 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, Tatum discovers the mountain is an Indian burial ground and adds speculations about a mummy's curse. Soon gawkers are arriving from all over the country, and there are those who have arrived to exploit them: hot dog stands, cotton candy vendors, a carnival with a merry-go-round.