Newspaperman Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) arrives in Albuquerque behind a tow truck, but he sits in his lame vehicle as if he’s the center of a presidential parade. That’s the level of haughty self-confidence Tatum has, despite the fact that he’s been chased out of all of the big Eastern cities for shady ethics. Here in the desert, he plans more of the same. As he tells his new boss at the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, “If there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog.” All of this sets up Ace in the Hole, from director Billy Wilder. When a local man (Richard Benedict) gets trapped in a collapsed cave, Tatum milks the story for all its worth—to the point of delaying the man’s rescue in order to ratchet up the suspense. For a Wilder picture, Ace in the Hole is as cynical as you’d expect, if missing the human messiness that marks the filmmaker’s best work (The Apartment, Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard). Ace is a fairly clear-cut morality play, as Tatum inevitably gets his comeuppance, with all sorts of digs at sensational journalism and exploitative capitalism along the way. (The trapped man’s wife, played by Jan Sterling, starts charging folks to see the cave on their property, which paves the way for a bustling marketplace to spring up.) Still, there are plenty of sharp one-liners—the script is by Wilder, Lesser Samuels, and Walter Newman—and Douglas is a hoot as Tatum. From the opening scene, where he strikes a match by hitting the carriage return on the newsroom’s typewriter, you know he’s going to spend the rest of the movie biting dogs, so to speak.
(1/14/2024)
