Ace in the Hole

This is Billy Wilder’s most personal and consequently most cynical film. He wrote and produced, as well as directed, so he took the hit when the film flopped, and retreated into presold, collaborative material for the rest of his career (and impressively so -- though I am not among those who count Some Like It Hot as the greatest of screen comedies, The Apartment made a deep impression on me when it first came out, and has remained a potent milestone in my filmgoing history.) Here Kirk Douglas makes for a memorable baddie as an unscrupulous reporter who digs up a great human interest story, and then excavates it to his own advantage and to the fatal disadvantage of his subject. A man is trapped in the cave-in of a cliffside pueblo in New Mexico, and Douglas exploits the accident for maximum coverage, in a forerunner of the media circus we have come to know so well. He hooks up with the trapped man’s wife, a bleach-blond party girl (Jan Stirling) who is trapped in the marriage and schemes her escape. This is noir under the baking desert sun, dark as pitch, with dialogue as hard-boiled as a 20-minute egg. There’s nothing like a sympathetic character in the film, Douglas is a little too much of a journalistic louse for us to believe or care about, and the pace staggers to a prolonged conclusion, so it’s not quite a lost masterpiece but it is awfully tasty and provocative for most of its length. (1951, TCM/T, n.) *7*