Ace in the Hole: Wilder's Media-Circus Cynicism

A man is trapped under a cliff in New Mexico. A reporter climbs down, finds him alive, and calculates that a rescue completed in a day is worth a paragraph, while a rescue that takes a week is worth a career. Ace in the Hole is the film Billy Wilder made straight after Sunset Boulevard, and it is the one that cost him. Paramount released it in 1951 into critical hostility and public indifference, retitled it The Big Carnival mid-run in the hope that audiences would think they were getting a comedy, and watched it fail anyway. Wilder’s assessment of what went wrong was straightforward: he had told the audience they were the problem.

Seventy-odd years later it is the most-cited film of his career among people who work in news, which is its own bleak comedy. The picture that nobody wanted has turned out to be the one that keeps describing next week.

Chuck Tatum, on his way down

Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) arrives in Albuquerque in a car being towed, having been fired from a series of increasingly less prestigious papers for a list of offences he recites with something close to pride. He talks his way onto the Sun-Bulletin, a small daily run by a decent, unhurried editor whose office motto about telling the truth Tatum regards as a personal insult, and then spends a year rotting in a town where nothing happens. Douglas plays him at maximum voltage — all jaw and appetite, a man visibly burning fuel he does not have — and the performance is the best thing he ever did precisely because Wilder never lets him be likeable.

Then a stop for petrol on the way to a rattlesnake hunt puts Tatum near a cliff dwelling where a local man, Leo Minosa, has gone in hunting Indian pots and been pinned by a fall of rock. Leo is alive, conscious, and reachable. A construction engineer on site says he can shore up the passage and have him out in perhaps twelve hours.

Tatum works out a better idea. He persuades the contractor, and the county sheriff — a man facing re-election who understands exactly what a week of national coverage is worth — that the safe method is to drill down through the top of the mesa. It will take days. It will also, and this is the film’s quiet horror, be presented to everyone as the cautious choice. The film’s most acidic joke is that nobody ever has to say the true thing out loud. Two men agree on a technical approach, and a third man stays under the rock while they agree it.

Jan Sterling’s Lorraine, Leo’s wife, is the picture’s other great creation. She was leaving him the day the rock fell, and she stays because Tatum tells her a widow-in-waiting at the mouth of a cave sells hamburgers to a crowd. Sterling plays her hard, bored, and entirely without the sentimentality the era demanded of a wife in peril, and her refusal to perform grief the way the cameras want is the film’s clearest-eyed observation about the whole apparatus: the crowd needs her to weep, and she cannot be bothered.

Why it works: Wilder builds the carnival in the background

The formal decision that makes the film is where Wilder puts the growth of the story. He does not cut away to a montage of newspapers spinning. He keeps the camera at the cliff and lets the desert fill up behind the actors, deep in the frame, over days.

At the start, the mesa has one car on it. Then a few sightseers. Then a coach party. Then a man selling sandwiches, then a ferris wheel, then a man on a stage singing a song written about the trapped man, then a fairground with an admission charge. Charles Lang’s deep-focus photography keeps all of it legible behind the foreground conversations, so you never watch the crowd arrive — you look up in reel four and it is simply there, the way these things actually happen. Wilder had a real fairground built and filled it with hundreds of extras, and he spends it the way a documentary would, in the background of scenes about something else.

The second decision is the sound. Radio broadcasts, loudhailers, a song about Leo playing on a wireless — the coverage becomes the film’s ambient noise, so that by the last act you cannot hear yourself think in a scene that is nominally about a man dying in a hole. Wilder ran the news trade’s own product back at it as an environmental hazard.

The third is the sheer nerve of the structure. Tatum is a monster from his first scene and never converts. There is no reel in which he is redeemed by contact with the good country people, and Wilder repeatedly sets up the beat where a lesser film would soften him and then declines to play it. What he gives Tatum instead is competence — the man is a superb reporter, and the film respects the craft while loathing the use — which is far more disturbing than incompetence would be.

The real ancestor, and the long shadow

The material is not invented. Wilder and his co-writers Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman built the film on two real cases: Floyd Collins, trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925, whose entrapment became a national radio and newspaper event complete with a funfair at the site and a reporter who won a Pulitzer for crawling in to interview him; and the 1949 death of Kathy Fiscus in a Californian well shaft, which was among the first live television news events in America. The carnival in the film is a reconstruction, and knowing that removes the last defence anyone might mount about exaggeration.

Ace in the Hole is also the film where Wilder stopped having a collaborator. It was his first as producer, director and co-writer without Charles Brackett, with whom he had made Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, and you can feel the absence of the man who used to talk him down. It is the most undiluted thing in his filmography.

Its descendants are a genre. Network (1976) is the same argument turned up to farce. Nightcrawler (2014) is Tatum with a camcorder and no newsroom to be fired from. Every film about a reporter who becomes the story is standing in this hole. The desk has looked at the ethics of the modern version of this — the true-crime industry’s appetite for other people’s worst days — and the uncomfortable finding is that Wilder got there first and was more pessimistic than any of us. Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps five years later would take the same newsroom and find careerism where Wilder found predation; Lang’s version is the more sociological, Wilder’s the more damning, because Wilder implicates the reader.

What the reception tells you

The failure is part of the text now, and the details are instructive. Reviewers in 1951 did not object that the film was badly made; they objected that it was an insult, and specifically that it was an insult delivered by a foreign-born director about the American public. Wilder had arrived from Europe in the 1930s having left family behind who did not survive the war, and the charge of ingratitude followed him through the picture’s reception. Paramount’s retitling to The Big Carnival was done without his approval and is the studio equivalent of a shrug — a marketing department trying to sell a funfair to people who had been told they were the freaks.

What is genuinely striking is that the film’s defenders arrived from the trade it attacked. Working reporters have kept it alive for seventy years, screening it in newsrooms, quoting Tatum’s arithmetic about human interest, because they recognise the sums. A film that the public rejected as slander on the public survives as the profession’s own most honest self-portrait, which is a joke Wilder would have enjoyed and would never have been allowed to write.

The honest case against

It is a hectoring film. Wilder’s contempt is so total that it occasionally forecloses the drama: the tourists who pay a dollar to gawp are drawn as cattle, given no interiority whatsoever, and the film’s thesis about the public would be stronger if one person in that crowd had a reason for being there. The sheriff’s rattlesnake, a symbol carried around in a box, is the kind of underlining Wilder normally had the taste to avoid.

Douglas is also, at moments, playing to the back of a theatre in a film shot in the desert. The performance’s ferocity is right for the character and occasionally a size too large for the frame, and there are line readings in the last act that a more secure film would have let him take again quieter.

Where to find it: it went unavailable for decades — one of the great buried studio films — and was restored and reissued in the mid-2000s, which is when its reputation finally turned. It is easy to see now, and it plays best with an audience, who tend to go very quiet at around the hour mark.

Spoilers below

Leo dies, and Tatum’s crime is not that he killed him. It is that he cannot even manage the confession properly.

The drilling reaches the chamber too late. The pneumonia takes Leo while the ferris wheel turns above him, and Tatum — who by this point has developed the beginnings of something that might be conscience, and has been trying for a day to reverse a machine he built — is left with a dead man, a fairground, and a story he can no longer sell as a rescue. He telephones the truth to the assembled press corps and nobody prints it, because the story they have written is better and there is no percentage in the correction. That is the film’s real verdict, and it is far bleaker than a punishment: the machinery does not care that he confessed. It has moved on.

The last movement is Lorraine, who does not become a grieving widow even after the fact, and who does the only thing in the film that reads as pure self-defence when Tatum finally puts his hands on her. Then Wilder brings Tatum back to the Sun-Bulletin office, to the editor with the motto on the wall, with the wound he has been ignoring for a reel, and gives him one last act of professional bravado — an offer to sell himself, at a price, one final time. He offers himself to the small-town editor he spent the film despising — the thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman, going for nothing — and then pitches forward dead onto the office floor. The last image belongs to the man with the honest motto on his wall, standing over a body he never asked for, holding a story he will presumably print correctly and which nobody will read.