Thursday Minute
No. 195 | November 25, 2010

Out of Print

Happy Thanksgiving!

Our theme this week
Films about the newspaper biz

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Zodiac (2007)
Tuesday         —   All the President’s Men (1976)
Wednesday    —   His Girl Friday (1940)

Ace in the Hole

Ace in the Hole was the intended title of the film but that’s not how it was released in 1951.  As director Billy Wilder described it to Cameron Crowe in Conversations with Wilder:  “And then one day Mr. Y. Frank Freeman, the head of Paramount—and as the joke goes, “Why Frank Freeman?”  “A question nobody can answer”—he decided that the title was bad, Ace in the Hole.  So he gave it a new title, The Big Carnival.  Idiot.”

A worse fate awaited the film:  for decades it was not available on home video.   (I know of one bootleg copy that had many hours of play during the blackout.)  Criterion finally undid the cinematic injustice in 2007, releasing the DVD of the film—and restoring Wilder’s title.

Ace in the Hole is a scathing and prescient look at the newspaper business.  Kirk Douglas stars as Chuck Tatum, an out-of-work reporter stranded in Albuquerque who talks himself into a job at the local paper.  Cynical and unscrupulous, he gets his chance to break a national news story when a local man is trapped in a cave.  Tatum maneuvers to delay the rescue attempt while he milks his time in the limelight.  Crowds come, and the victim’s wife (Jan Sterling) seeks to cash in on her husband’s misfortune.  She takes up with Tatum, who wins back his old job at a New York paper while playing the hero to the mob that comes to be entertained by the spectacle.  All are oblivious to the poor victim, Leo (Richard Benedict), who holds on bravely but not long enough to be rescued.

The film, regarded as a classic today, was not one of Wilder’s box office successes.  The director again:

Ace in the Hole was a very peculiar thing.  I was very fond of the picture—I got wonderful, wonderful reactions to it from more serious people.  But for some reason or other, people did not want to see that grim a picture, that boasted the guy in the hole there, and the reporter, Mr. Kirk Douglas.  It was very somber.  It was one of my most somber pictures.  And they did not believe me that when somebody’s a newspaperman, they are capable of that behavior.

The newspaperman wasn’t the only one capable of that behavior.  The public was too.  People may not want to admit to such a black-hearted view, but from today’s vantage the film has the unmistakable ring of truth.

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Ace in the Hole (1951)
Billy Wilder, director
Walter Newman, Lesser Samuels, Billy Wilder, writers
Charles Lang, cinematographer
Trailer

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Ace in the Hole (1951)
Billy Wilder, director
Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling

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Quote of note
Chuck:  It’s Sunday.  Aren’t you going to church?
Lorraine:  I don’t go to church.  Kneeling bags my nylons.
—Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling), Ace in the Hole (1951)

…58…59…60.