TV Note: "Ace in the Hole" (5/17)
David Shasha
"Ace in the Hole" will be screened on Turner Classic Movies, Friday, May 17th at 8:00 PM
Lost Movie Classic: "Ace in the Hole" (Billy Wilder, 1951)
A number of prominent Hollywood directors came to this country as refugees from Germany, fleeing the degenerate and perverted Nazi regime. Perhaps the best known among them was Billy Wilder who fashioned a career as a movie director and screenwriter of rare insight and intelligence. His films have become classics of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Films like "Double Indemnity," "Sunset Blvd.," "Some Like it Hot" and later achievements like "Stalag 17," "Sabrina," "The Apartment," and perhaps the funniest film ever made about the Cold War with the Soviets "One, Two, Three" are all examples of genre filmmaking at its very best. From dark film noirs to biting satirical comedies, Wilder made a name for himself as a writer of rare wit and genius; his movies always carried an incisive message even when they were at their most buoyant and entertaining.
A film that was a rare commercial and critical failure for Wilder was "Ace in the Hole," his follow-up to the very dark melodrama "Sunset Blvd.," an expose of the society of spectacle that was many years ahead of its time and has truly yet to be surpassed as a cynical take on the lengths to which journalists will go to fabricate news stories in order to achieve notoriety and fame.
"Ace in the Hole" (re-titled "The Big Carnival" after its unsuccessful initial release) is a film that speaks in near-contemporary terms: The movie tells the story of a washed-up newspaper writer named Chuck Tatum, played with biting ferocity by the great Kirk Douglas, who arrives in Albuquerque, New Mexico looking for a way to make it back to the top of his profession. After tiring of the many seemingly boring and banal stories that are part of the fabric of small town American life, he stumbles upon a situation that he immediately seeks to exploit for his own benefit.
While driving to cover some sort of snake show, stopping at a roadside shop to gas his car, he and his photographer discover that a man who owns the small shop in the desert has been trapped in a mountain crevice. It is then that Tatum begins to work his story.
Seeing in the story the possibility of his own glory - Pulitzer Prizes and glittery New York soirees - Tatum begins to map out a strategy to milk the trapped man in the mountain for all it is worth. Exploiting the idea that the more salacious and sensational news stories are, the more the general public will snap to attention and follow them, Tatum decides to prolong the rescue of the victim, not caring about the potential danger to the man.
Rather than have the rescuers build reinforcements to the cave walls to get him out, which would take mere hours, Tatum, working in tandem with the local sheriff, corrupt and up for re-election, decide to have the rescuers drill from the top of the mountain down to the victim. They make this decision because it will ensure that they get the maximum time lag of a week that will allow them to achieve their own personal aims. They do not for one minute consider the suffering of the trapped man who instead of being released from his torment, will now act as a spectacle for the many thousands of Americans who come to the site to view the thing firsthand and the even more Americans who are following the story through their media - newspapers, TV and radio.
"Ace in the Hole" was ignored and rejected by the American viewing public because of its merciless cynicism and relentless darkness. Unlike other Wilder films, "Ace in the Hole" contains no moments of comedy or lightness at all. It tracks a spiraling descent into a moral hell that its protagonists can never emerge from. Wilder chooses to play the thing down the line without any respite. The viewer is left suffocating at various points in the film, similar to the trapped man in the cave, and is forced to stomach the intensely cruel machinations of Tatum whose sense of immorality knows no bounds.
What Wilder constructed in "Ace in the Hole" is something quite rare in the history of the Hollywood film: A movie that does not spare the audience in any way, shape or form. It assaults the senses in ways that make later films on the subject like Paddy Chayevsky's much-feted "Network" - a film that is oh-so tame compared to Wilder's dark and hallucinatory vision in "Ace" - seem like child's play. The film's characters are nihilistic and opportunistic monsters who never even attempt to compromise their own dark and sinister motivations, motivations mired in their own selfish desires.
That the film prophesies an age of media gluttony and immorality is striking though it is not all that it has to say. True, we have now become so mired in this media-saturated landscape of death, rapine and destruction as a way of life that the film acts as a prescient clarion call and warning of what we need to understand in order to maintain our inherent moral sense. But in another way, the film explores even more deeply and profoundly many of the humanist themes that permeate the classic Hollywood productions: the integrity of the individual, our responsibility for one another as human beings, the trust that we place in our professionals, the allure of a quick buck and the base emotions that lie at the very heart of us all.
Hollywood often looked in a telling manner at the many weaknesses of humanity and in a film like "Ace in the Hole" the malevolence and the cruel viciousness of movie characters is given a complete airing. The film is littered with characteristic Wilder touches; little details scattered throughout the story that serve to amplify the larger themes of the work. We have the critical and telling sub-text involving the victim's wife who willingly joins up with Tatum and begins to develop a romantic attraction for him; the attraction being based cynically in the panache and suavity that Tatum displays in his cruelly malicious audacity. A man who knows no sense of moral right, Tatum becomes a sexually attractive creature whose macho facade ropes in the wife who lusts in her heart for him while her poor, pitiful husband is lying half-dead in the rubble of his rocky grave.
The ways in which the allure of this evil, which is sugar-coated and made shiny by the seemingly endless amount of money, power and fame lavished on the protagonists, can accrue from the publicity that is being generated by the story speaks to us quite clearly today in a world where people are seen as idiot dupes who only pay attention to the shiny objects in their rearview mirror rather than the more prosaic aspects of the moral life; a life that is seen as less romantic and exciting than the spectacle.
"Ace in the Hole" presents the society of the spectacle in a way that is rare in the cinema. It is a harsh film, brutal and unsparing, yet it refuses to resort to obscurantist technique or unrealistic plot devices. It is a film squarely in the realist tradition and all the more effective for it. It is a story that is eminently plausible and often feels as if it is a documentary. The power of Kirk Douglas' performance which captures Tatum's malevolence and evil with a gripping authenticity defines for us one of the great characters - and least known - in the classic Hollywood film. Unlike Wilder's other villains, the murderous Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity" foremost among them - Chuck Tatum is a man without a single redeeming characteristic; a man whose scheming knows no bounds and whose moral sense is disfigured to the point of no return.
In the end, the continued obscurity of "Ace in the Hole" can be explained by the inability of the movie-going audience to accept the existence of evil and our own maliciousness and vainglorious flippancy when it comes to the suffering of others. We become entranced by the sight of blood and death and our innermost natures tend, when left unchecked, to revel in violence and pain. We achieve an almost erotic rush from the sight of a train wreck and will pay top dollar to those who can serve up that train wreck to us on a silver platter.
The eternal timeliness - and concomitant timelessness - of Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" makes it mandatory viewing for those who seek to better understand human nature and its proclivity for cruelty and uncaring. In a culture where the focus has become even more resolutely on the self and its perquisites, "Ace in the Hole" is even more relevant now than it was in 1951. In a world of iPods and Blackberrys where people are zoned into their own world and see the outside world as a form of entertainment, the simple joys, tragedies and failures of our fellow man are but a game to us. And this is the power that Wilder tapped into with this movie. Oblivious to the suffering of our neighbor, we adopt a posture that looks to satisfy our own prurient interests, wants and desires for which we are more than happy to proffer big money. So the cycle of malicious violence is perpetuated by an undisciplined commercial juggernaut that places a premium on the misfortune of others.
In a world where we have MTV's "The Real World" and "American Idol" and other so-called "Reality" shows that feast on the misery of others presented as entertainment for masses of people, Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" speaks to us loudly and clearly. It is a deeply moral vision that does not spare the fearsomely warped sensibilities of the viewer and locks the audience into its nefarious web in order to shake it out of its moral malaise. It is a movie that is not always pleasant to watch, but whose ethical sense is filled with the kind of fierce integrity that is as noble as it is rare.
One for the ages.
David Shasha
From SHU 253, March 21, 2007