Films come and go regardless of their quality; the rare exceptions to this are those that capture the mood of the time without getting bogged down in pop culture or fashion. Failing this, perfectly satirising an easily corruptible medium also works. For no greater example, we have Ace in the Hole. Billy Wilder’s classic journalist satire has the same timeless quality as Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Network too, all three as fresh today as the day they were made.
Ace in the Hole stars Kirk Douglas as Chuck Tatum, a big shot journalist who has been fired from every newspaper he’s worked for. In trying to turn around his career, he ends up in Albuquerque offering his services to the Sun-Bulletin for a fraction of what he was formerly paid in New York. This is a world away from the complex grey of the big city newspaper, this small-time New Mexican publication has an office wall adorned with a hand-sewn insignia of the paper’s philosophy “tell the truth”.
Compare that to Chuck Tatum who states in one sparky exchange, “I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog”, and there’s a clear disparity between the two parties. Sent to cover a rattlesnake hunt, Tatum and his photographer happen upon an accident on their way where a local man is trapped under a mountain of rubble deep in a Native American burial mound. From this, Tatum manipulates the situation regardless of the community and the people affected.
As time has passed Billy Wilder’s 1951 classic has grown in stature, and it has come to be a defining film depicting the immorality of the trade.
ACE IN THE HOLE
This is a savage film that takes a vision of what the modern press journalist is and mutates it to monstrous proportions within a controlled microcosm. At least that would be true at inception, looking at Ace in the Hole now with modern sensibilities then you are looking at something that had a scary degree of foresight. Take the line “if there is no news, I’ll bite a dog” and the recent revelations of phone hacking, the poisonous ideal championed by Tatum has come to define a corrupt newspaper platform. As time has passed Billy Wilder’s 1951 classic has grown in stature, and it has come to be a defining film depicting the immorality of the trade. This becomes all the more tangible by Tatum’s harrowing endeavour, observing the community build a circus around a man fighting for his life at the beck and call of one man looking to propel his career.
The man has no shame and Kirk Douglas gives the most urgent and passionate performance of his career. He is the perfect capsule of everything wrong with modern journalism. Like many a Wilder lead, Chuck Tatum is a talkative sort, who idealizes chaos and destruction as a child would have in a toy store. A side that he keeps hidden from those that he is playing, to the public who idealise him he appears to be an affable gentleman who only cares for the fate of the trapped Leo (Richard Benedict), a role that he plays to perfection.
Behind his public façade, Chuck Tatum has a violent side, if he believes a person is straying from his plan (be that his former boss or Leo’s wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling)) he will explode in a fit of violent rage for people having plans that fail to subscribe to ‘his copy’. Best of all for both the film and its lead, Tatum doesn’t realise the folly of his ways. The only awakening he goes through is when he realises he’s gone too far, ruining his career – Wilder is 100% committed to this cause, and it’s this that has ensured that Ace in the Hole is just as biting a satire now as it was back in 1951. The sharp intelligence of Ace in the Hole is yet more proof – if needed – that Billy Wilder is one of the greatest directors of the 20th Century.
ACE IN THE HOLE IS OUT NOW ON MASTERS OF CINEMA BLU-RAY
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