Ace In The Hole

Ace In The Hole was written, directed and produced by Billy Wilder, who is probably best known for The Apartment, though there's a lot more interesting things you could know about him. He's a Jewish immigrant to America by way of Austria, who smelled trouble when Hitler was rising to power in the 1930s and took off for the U.S. In spite of his immigrant status, which might have put him on more troublesome footing than most, he refused to participate in the McCarthy witch hunts and Hollywood blacklisting and consistently made pictures that at least took a few swipes at the social and political establishment.

One of those that does that more strongly than others is Ace In The Hole, which casts Kirk Douglas as a semi-alcoholic and washed-up New York newspaperman who gets himself fired from nearly every major city paper in the country and ends up drifting into Albuquerque - then considered a pretty podunk place - desperate for a job. After a year covering boring local stories there, his prayers for a "return to the big time" are answered when he's the first to stumble upon a man trapped in an old mine. The man could be fairly easily rescued by bracing the walls of the mine before sending in a rescue team, but Douglas's character manipulates the proceedings - with the help of a crooked sheriff seeking re-election - so that the rescue takes a full week, meanwhile bleeding the story dry with his exclusive access to the trapped man.

The film apparently met with pretty harsh criticism in 1951 and was a commercial flop, most of this centered not on the actual quality of the film, but the darkness of it and how it dares to portray a journalist as being able to stoop to the lows that Douglas's character does. While I do agree with the general modern sentiment that the criticism of the time was reactionary and conditioned by play-it-safe commercial concerns, I do also have to concede that the whole story is a little over-the-top and unbelievable, particularly in how all the other newspaper men who eventually arrive on the scene just sit there and do absolutely nothing to investigate of their own accord while Douglas continues the circus.

That isn't enough to bring the film down, though; Douglas is pure manic awesome as the stone-cold manipulator and the whole thing is fascinatingly dark and honest for a 1950s Hollywood picture. Also certainly doesn't feel very dated in this Fox News, Entertainment Tonight world of ours. Easily worth a watch.