There’s one thing today’s journalists can’t do with a computer, and that’s light a match as a typewriter slides back into place. It’s the way Chuck Tatum does it in “Ace in the Hole,” a terrific, Old Hollywood critique of the press in a grizzly, bitter noir.
Kirk Douglas plays Tatum as a smarmy, cutthroat reporter with attitude and condescending wit to his editor at the small Albuquerque newspaper, despite coming to him after being fired by a dozen newspapers on the other side of the Mississippi. Tatum craves a vicious cycle of “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism, and his belief is that one big story will break him out of New Mexico and back onto the East Coast.
He finally catches his break when a man gets trapped in a cave-in just outside a small Native American town. Tatum finds the man deep inside the cave. He says his name is Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), and he’s thrilled that not only is someone going to rescue him, he’s going to be in the paper too. Tatum plays up the angle that Minosa is trapped in an Indian burial ground, he bribes the local authorities for exclusive access, he forces Minosa’s wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) to stay and lap up the luxury that’s about to come in the media firestorm, and he even persuades the foreman to use an elaborate, slow and inefficient way to dig out Minosa.
Billy Wilder’s film, which he wrote, produced and directed, is about being stuck in a dead-end spot between a rock and a hard place. “There’s three of us buried here,” Tatum says to Lorraine, and through shady journalistic ethics he pulls himself and this small town deeper and deeper into the circus that this story becomes.
It’s this element that makes “Ace in the Hole” still poignant today. The media cycle moves much quicker today, and exclusivity is even more difficult, but Wilder’s scathing critique of the press remains sharp. “It’s better one man is trapped than 64, or even 264,” Tatum explains. You remember one name, but you gloss over the big tragedies. It’s called “human interest.”
A lesser film would’ve made this a more honorable story, but Wilder darkens it. Tatum doesn’t have an ounce of heroism in his blood, and his remorse comes in the fact that he created so much misery for his subjects that he dug a bigger hole for himself.
Douglas is overacting the part here, but it’s a role his son Michael would still play today, and watching him sneer with every one of Wilder’s clever lines is such a treat.
“Ace in the Hole” works as a journalism drama because Wilder peppers just enough details into Minosa’s grim fate and in the town’s rise and fall of activity (notice the beautifully desolate image of one of the locals standing in an empty field where thousands once stood to raise money for Minosa) for me to create my own human interest article. Tatum may not be a journalistic role model, but his actions make for a great story.