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The status of Ace in the Hole as Billy Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is evident in the opening shot of Kirk Douglas riding on a car as it is being towed. Here is a man reveling sardonically in the joys of misfortune and humiliation much like William Holden was in the beginning of Sunset Boulevard and Jack Lemmon would (with a gentler tongue) in The Apartment. Wilder’s characters are glum but it’s from their very glumness that they extract optimism and not by the forced way of making the most of a bad situation. Before the full extent of his nature is revealed, we have to love Chuck Tatum’s (Douglas) cynical slickness. Who can resist the cool bit in which he lights a match with a typewriter? Douglas’s Chuck Tatum is the classical Wilder man.
More than a follow-up to Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole feels like a forerunner to The Apartment. Tatum arrives at an office that, like the one in The Apartment, is susceptible to corruption. This time, it’s a newspaper office and corruption comes in the form of Chuck Tatum. His intentions seem modest enough at first. After bad conduct cost him his job at news firms back East, he has traveled to this small New Mexico town to work as a reporter. He seems like the conventional rowdy city boy that moves to a desert town when he starts complaining about the lack of noise and excitement. However, this trope later adds to our understanding of the character and his motivations. His quote, “Bad news sells best. Good news is no news,” spells out his motive a little too clearly, though.
In some ways, Ace in the Hole is a victim of its own notoriety. After a copyright mayhem kept it unavailable for some time, Ace in the Hole became a much discussed forbidden fruit. Unfortunately, even this minimal foreknowledge of the premise will make the initial mysteries easy to resolve.
But the movie still works. Kirk Douglas gives arguably his chilliest performance as Chuck Tatum, a news hustler savvy about what sells in the newspaper industry. The most fascinating thing about him is his insightful dialogue. This is a man who knows how to use his experience for personal gain. When he happens on an unfortunate incident (a man is trapped inside a cave when the stone roof collapsed) he seizes the chance for a sensational story.
What surprises when we first meet Leo (Richard Benedict), the trapped treasure-hunter, is that he is not too different from Chuck Tatum. He went into the cave too deep to search for buried Navajo artifacts. Even as he awaits rescue, he implies that his misfortune was worth it because of a valuable vase he unearthed. Tellingly, he’s not offended, but rather proud when Tatum snaps a picture of him for the paper. Of course, Leo can’t guess Tatum’s real intent, which is to play up the angle as, in his words, “King Tut in New Mexico”, blaming Leo’s accident on a curse sent by an old Navajo chief angered by a white man trying to steal his treasure.
In general, Billy Wilder had a fascination with the corruptibility of working-men from an insurance salesman, to a Hollywood writer, and finally to a journalist. But Chuck Tatum is distinct from other Wilder creations in that he is a willful opportunist. Leo’s wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) is on to him, but she too is happy about her husband’s predicament. In her own way she is even nastier than Tatum and uses the situation to attract visitors that come to gawk at the rescue effort to eat at her roadside diner. In fact, she is indirectly responsible for Leo’s accident, as he went treasure-hunting in an attempt to create a better life for her, since the spoiled shrew is resentful of his meager means. It’s significant that Tatum reflects on his own conscience only when he judges it against her morality.
Soon the sheriff (Ray Teal), Tatum’s young photographer (Robert Arthur), and the local tourists fall under the spell of opportunism. Tatum and the people he pulls strings on degrade from vultures to downright evil. Tatum manipulates both the sheriff (who will do anything to be reelected) and the local rescue-workers to delay the rescue-effort so that he can milk the story. But as always in Wilder’s vision, there are honest people. In The Apartment it was Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter, in Ace in the Hole its Leo’s father who is naïve enough to believe that Tatum is primarily interested in saving his son.
On another level, Ace in the Hole is a polemic on different aspects of American culture. The cult of celebrity is examined through the town’s admiration and blind acceptance of Chuck Tatum as an authority. Wilder also attacks the exploitation of tragedies for commercial use when the locals build a fairground on the rescue site.
Now how are we to feel about Leo? His naïve referral to Chuck as his best friend and dreams of winning back the affection of his superficial wife are manipulative but effective nonetheless. Separating him from the rest of the local vultures, he is an allegorical flawed saint. His greed got him into trouble but he is a good man while Tatum is just cruel.
An interesting secondary character is Tatum’s editor Boot (Porter Hall). His penultimate appearance indicates that he is intended as a Christ-like figure. He is the sole incorruptible force in the movie and the only person who can see the evil in what Tatum is doing. His office wall has a frame with the words “Tell the Truth” written like a commandment on a tablet and just when Tatum has sunk to his lowest, Boot comes to him like a holy apparition. He brings the voice of compassion and humility on this visit. Fittingly, there is a crucifix on the wall behind him. In the end, Tatum’s demise is strikingly similar to that of Walter Neff in Wilder’s Double Indemnity as they both are Biblical in nature. A repentant sinner drops his wounded body in the arms of a forgiving savior. In Double Indemnity it was Neff’s boss played by Edward G. Robinson. In Ace in the Hole it is the one figure that has remained pure throughout.
Perhaps, Ace in the Hole is not quite a great film because it pushes its moral too hard and (although it was inspired by two true stories) exaggerates both its characters and the effect they have on society. But while certainly not Wilder’s best work, Ace in the Hole is an excellent and brilliantly conceived mantel for Wilder’s most powerful motif, a soul poisoned with corruption finding their last shred of humanity when it’s too late.

and when i though this is just another Billy Wilder film in the same vein with Sunset Boulevard, and said the word ‘Billy Wilder is so fuc***n overrated’ (the first 30 minutes makes me worry,i’m already have the intention to turn this down), this film turns out pretty good. and dark. Kirk Douglas played perfectly as an unsymphatetic main character (probably one of the first of its kind) as a such greedy and ambitious journalist (and is it such a coincidence that his character remind me a lot with Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, which is played by his son. Again,strange world we live in..)

All great artists know that it is impossible to understand human nature and experience without looking at the extremes of greatness and vileness. Film noir prefers looking at the vile and Ace in the Hole proves that noir can sometimes be more about themes than aesthetics. Of all the films in the common noir catalogue, Ace in the Hole is one of the hardest to classify as noir. The harsh vision of the world and shadowy lighting in the cave where Leo Minosa is trapped seem noirish, but Wilder’s gutting of the sensationalistic media and the citizens who eagerly watch every filthy moment of it (“Mr. and Mrs. America”, as Tatum would say) is about as far from the criminal city streets of noir as you can get. Charles Tatum bears resemblance to paradigmatic noir protagonist, but could be best thought of as a typical noir “hero” taking a vacation from the city.

If there’s a real hero in this story from Wilder’s perspective, its Jacob Q. Boot; the scrawny, cautious newspaper editor who wears both glasses and suspenders … the man who supposedly coined the phrase “Tell The Truth” and hung it up all over his office building. Boot hires Tatum from the onset and consistently tells him to straighten up. He even takes a hiatus to the New Mexico desert during the heat of the journalistic carnival in an attempt to talk some sense into the derailed journalist.

During this encounter, Tatum becomes inflamed with rage as only a character played by Kirk Douglas can:

“I don’t belong in your office. Not with that embroidered sign on the wall; it gets in my way. […] I’m on my way back to the top, and if it takes a deal with a crooked sheriff, that’s alright with me! And if I have to fancy it up with an Indian curse and a broken hearted wife for Leo, then that’s alright too!”

Statements like this are what make the film’s ending so powerful because Jacob Boot’s office is where Tatum drags his bleeding, guilt-ridden body in a last-minute attempt to recover his soul. In a sordid and pitch-black way, Charles Tatum wants some kind of absolution, to come clean of his actions … something very rare for a noir hero.

It’s obvious that Wilder was quite the cynic and the world of Ace in the Hole can seem absurdly cynical upon first viewing. The moral reprobation of Charles Tatum is endless and the rate at which “the big carnival” grows (particularly the admission sign to the Indian ruins consistently advancing in price and the ridiculous big city attractions dragged out to the desert by the media) is wearying. Yet upon second viewing Ace in the Hole is so calculated and full of life that its environment seems like a haunting reality more than fifty years after its making. It may seem bleedingly obvious and even farcical the first time around, but if you’ve been out in the world long enough, the truth of it can’t be denied.

When all is said and done, Leo Minosa wasn’t trapped in The Cave of the Seven Vultures by rocks and firmament. He was trapped there by none other than Charles Tatum’s desire to become rich and famous, to make a name for himself and prove his place in the world. With efficacious realism, Ace in the Hole echoes a piece of wisdom known the world over but only rarely applied: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

Billy Wilder’s Ace In The Hole is a blistering condemnation of America’s vulturous nature; with acid cynicism, the film doesn’t skewer America, the film disembowels.

Ace In The Hole was not a big commercial success upon release; and to see the movie now, it’s easy to see why; because, even before “everything changed” on 9/11, Americans were none too keen on self-flagellation.

Read more: http://classicfilms.suite101.com/article.cfm/ace_in_the_hole_billy_wilder_buries_the_lead#ixzz0NQZx1LOk

America as seen through the gaze of an immigrant, clear-eyed and cynical. Wilder had revealed the dark heart of his adopted society through some unflinching filmic essays on murder, alcoholism, fame and desperation and would go on to leaven his cynicism with humour in later films, but before the sugar coated poison pills of ‘The Apartment’, ‘The Fortune Cookie’ and ‘Kiss Me Stupid’, he delivers ‘Ace In The Hole’. The centre of the film is Kirk Douglas and the manic energy he invests into his performance of Chuck Tatum, a reporter with a small time newspaper, he has delusions of granduer and he’s looking for his magic bullet, his ticket out of Palookaville. Douglas doesn’t deliver his dialogue as much as spit it, as disgusted with himself it seems as with the rest of the world. Determined to prove himself a somebody, he finds his chance in an unlikely place, at the bottom of a mine shaft in New Mexico, in the form of a simple hearted nobody, Leo Minosa.

Leo is trapped in nthe aptly named ‘Mountain of the Seven Vultures’ and needs help, and Chuck, who is not going to let this piece of luck die on the vine, is there to see that he doesn’t get it, not at least until every last drop has been milked from the story via national syndication, with Chuck as the exclusive conduit for the salivating public. Chuck’s partner in this unholy enterprise is none other than Leo’s wife, Lorraine, played with glorious indifference by Jan Sterling. Unlike Double Indemnity, where a pretty blonde is the motivation for the male character to pursue a corrupt course, here Chuck is happy to use her for what he can, but his destiny will not be compromised by what’s on offer in the bedroom. Chuck bribes and manipulates everything in sight to run the show to suit his singular agenda, he won’t give a sucker an even break, not even one with a sweet kisser.
Chuck bribes the local sheriff (Ray Teal) to get exclusive access to Leo, and to ensure the spectacle is drawn out as much as possible, the crowds will remember him at election time and his future vote is therefore secure. Chuck convinces Lorraine to hang around, she was leaving a loveless marriage when Leo got trapped, but the business the event will bring in under Chuck’s aegis will see her make plenty of money.

Wilder also brings in a complicit public, in the form of the ‘Big Carnival’ that spontaneously springs up at the foot of the mountain, invading sacred Indian territory in the process but here, apart from the holy dollar, nothing is sacred. Leo is good copy, his pretty and worried wife adds human interest and people, in a growing mass-media age need to be entertained. Wilder manages to pre-empt the ‘news-as-entertainment’ bandwagon by 30 odd years. Kazan would tread similar ground a couple of years later with ‘Face In The Crowd’, an indicator of where a celebritocracy will lead us. Wilder’s ending spares no-one, least of all Chuck, who’s cynical manipulations come back to haunt him. The moral centre of the film is poor, warm hearted and naive Leo, who endures suffering due to Chuck’s endless maneuver’s and remains blissfully unaware of his duplicitious wife’s betrayal. ‘Ace In The Hole’ is still a remarkably powerful film, even if 21st centruy ears can vaguely hear Sting singing ’We’re sending our love down the well’ to Bart Simpson, when the carnival is in full swing!

The entire event plays out like a blockbuster movie, with the cars arranged at the foot of the mountain as if they were at a drive-in show, like Hitchcock and Michael Powell Wilder is commenting on the nature of voyeurism and the fact that the part the film industry plays is a far from neutral one. The film died a commercial death upon it’s release, no huge surprise given it seems like a single digit salute to America from a director who’d done well in his adopted country, but tough love is still love, even if it is accompanied with honest and meaningful critiicism. Wilder is also commenting on what occurs when the nature of morbid fascination and media corporatisation intersect, to produce real life suffering as crass entertainment, edifying no-one and diminishing us all. Chuck’s final realisation of his own moral failure is rewarded with a kind of ironic fate, Wilder’s circus moves on, but the vaguely unsettling stink of the elephant shit lingers. The consumers insatiable appetite for something new is undiminished, no lessons are learned. ‘Ace In The Hole’ is a noir-ish story transplanted to a dusty regional location, but the hearts are still black and there’s no escaping what’s within, no matter where you run to.

This is as dark and cynical a film as you will ever see. It is also one of the greatest, thanks in part to the brilliant writing and direction of Billy Wilder. However, your opinion of the film will hinge on the performance of Kirk Douglas. You’ll either love him or hate him. Personally, I can’t get enough of his Chuck Tatum. Ace in the Hole is a giant cry of disgust, and Douglas is the one voicing this disgust. Tatum unfortunately represents the kind of person many have become while trying to pursue the American dream, and in the process we see him losing his soul. No one in this film is absolved. Not the media, not the politicians, and most importantly not the public. Wilder points out that while the media plants the seeds, it is us who take the bait and are the driving force behind the Chuck Tatums of the world. Unfortunately, the public and the media didn’t take kindly to a film that held up a mirror to their faces, and it flopped. While Sunset Boulevard is widely considered the ultimate Billy Wilder cynical masterpiece, I believe Ace in the Hole is truly his greatest work.. It is a sad and angry look at our society that unfortunately has become eerily prescient.Yes, the ending is contrived, but one must consider the Hays Production Code at the time. Besides, I wouldn’t have the movie end any other way. I love every nasty second of this masterpiece.