ACE IN THE HOLE
aka THE BIG CARNIVAL 1951, Criterion, DD-2.0/MA/+, $39.95, 111m 9s, DVD-1 By Kim Newman
“I’ve met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time,” drawls lazy-lid- ded Lorraine (Jan Sterling) at driven reporter Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), “but you—you’re twenty minutes!”
Indeed. Billy Wilder’s ACE IN
THE HOLE, made in the wake of the success of SUNSET BLVD., remains a tough proposition: it is at once hard-boiled to the point of parody (“I don’t go to church... kneeling bags my nylons”) and an all-too-horribly-accurate analysis of unappealing (and still current) trends in the mass me- dia. Audiences who responded to the sadomasochist gothic of Norma Desmond and were in tune with the prevailing pessi- mism of film noir still didn’t warm to ACE IN THE HOLE on its origi- nal release (or when swiftly put out again under the title THE BIG CARNIVAL). Like Elia Kazan’s A FACE IN THE CROWD or (a gen- eration later) Sidney Lumet’s NETWORK, it’s vitriolic about mass media manipulation— though these films are often la- beled cynical, they paradoxically view cynicism as the worst sin a newsman can commit.
Tatum, a washed-up big city reporter, talks his way into a job at an Albuquerque paper but hopes to latch onto a big story which will get him back to New York so he can rub his success in the face of the editor who sacked him. In the tiny hamlet of Escudero, built at the foot of an
Corrupt reporter Kirk Douglas turns a minor mining disaster into a carnival sideshow to ensure a second chance at success in Billy Wilder’s ACE IN THE HOLE.
ancient Indian cliff-dwelling, Tatum’s curiosity is piqued when he learns that amiable store- keeper Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) is trapped by a cave-in under “the Mountain of the Seven Vultures.” Recalling the Floyd Collins case, a “nine days’ won- der” of the 1920s, and tacking on a curse angle out of King Tut, Tatum blows this small situation up into a major news story. He gets a crooked Sheriff (Ray Teal) onside by promising favorable coverage in advance of an elec- tion, and they conspire to drag things out by drilling down from the top of the mountain over sev- eral days rather than shoring up a tunnel and getting Leo free in a matter of hours. Lorraine, Leo’s bottle blonde wife, is as eager to escape her own form of being buried alive as Chuck and her husband are, but is persuaded to stay when sightseers (“Mr. and Mrs. America”) flock to the Minosa diner, and a tent city (which eventually includes an actual carnival) gathers. The sting in the tale is that Chuck has to provide the happy ending that the story needs, and Leo—driven out of his mind by the pounding drill and suffering from pneumonia— isn’t liable to wind up in any shape to play his part as plucky, grateful rescuee.
The driven, grinning Tatum is such a potent protagonist that no one can stand against him. An- other writer-director might have built up the honest small-town editor as a voice of conscience, but Wilder casts fussy little Por- ter Hall in the role and gives him the ridiculous name “Jacob Q. Boot.” A few other Tashlin- Sturges-like funny names sug- gest this might once have been conceived as a newspaper com- edy along the lines of THE FRONT PAGE (which Wilder would remake, poorly) or NOTH- ING SACRED, though it winds up
as an attack on the kind of ruth- less wisecrackers the earlier films find admirable as well as enter- taining. In A FACE IN THE CROWD, the TV singer dema- gogue (Andy Griffith) is undone when his audiences find out just how much contempt he has for such “slobs,” but Wilder takes care not to go too far down that route: the crowd who gather, slurp ice-cream and rubberneck at the site are ridiculous and small-minded, but have genuine feelings to manipulate. Frank Cady and Geraldine Hall, as “Mr. and Mrs. America,” are comic creations but manage a grace note of grief as the story sours. In the end, Tatum saves his deepest loathing for himself, but even his one stab at redemption is frighteningly in character: af- ter his story has blown up in his face, he desperately and half-se- riously tries to sell New York on a truth-behind-the-headlines exposé about a reporter who kept a man buried alive to advance his career. (If he sold the movie rights, it could become ACE IN THE HOLE!) No actor but Kirk Douglas could so relish 15 min- utes of onscreen internal bleed- ing as Tatum staggers along the via dolorosa Fred MacMurray bloodied in Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Even Wilder backed off from repeating this intensity, preferring to work with William Holden (Douglas turned down the Holden role in STALAG 17) or Jack Lemmon and sugaring corrosive satire with romance (Chuck and Lorraine’s mutual disgust, shown by a clinch in which his fist grips her hair in close-up, doesn’t count) and al- lowing for some trace of opti- mism in his endings. Tatum is so ghastly, audiences and censors wouldn’t have tolerated an end- ing which let him off, but this is the last Wilder film—following SUNSET BLVD. and DOUBLE
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