Wilder's bleak commentary comes up aces

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, July 20, 2007

That chin, like a shovel with a perfect round dent in it, juts with the aggression of a bulldog's underbite. Those teeth are set in eternal grit, because if he unclenched them, they might snap off someone's ear. Seething through the enamel walls are the sounds of a tortured instrument that purrs here, grumbles there, and, frequently in mid-growl, cracks like a tantrumy pubescent boy's, so fraught with passion is it.

Kirk Douglas: Man or beast?

For such a marvelous actor, the question is rhetorical. He is, of course, both.

And Douglas — that raving, roaring alpha fella, all barrel-chested testosterone — is hardly greater than in Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole," an acid bath of social commentary that practically willed itself to failure and obscurity with its unremitting bleakness. Society looked in the mirror, flinched and fled.

Released in 1951, it's a newspaper drama about a reporter of crooked ways and Macbethian ambition. It's a moral story about media sensationalism gone berserk that has proved alarmingly prescient (O.J., Paris, Princess Di, the little girl who fell down the well — the Greatest Shows on Earth). It's a snapshot, an indictment, a warning gone unheeded.

"Hard-nosed" is a compliment to a newspaper reporter. Chuck Tatum, played by a lock-jaw Douglas, wants what every driven American wants — success, fat with fame and money. He hungers for a return to a big-city byline after drinking and lousing his way out of gigs at seven major papers.

He knows he has to start small and rebuild his myth before bouncing back. We meet Tatum barging into the office of a rinky-dink paper in Albuquerque, N.M., demanding a job while barking his own flatulent praises.

"If there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog!" he yawps at the bemused editor, who coldly gives him a desk. This after Tatum mocks, tellingly, a framed needlepoint that reads, "Tell the Truth." The scene is totally unbelievable — who would hire this megalomaniac? — but Douglas gnaws it and, in his ferocity, nails it.

Tatum hates the place, this "sun-baked Siberia," and the film swells with the acrid musk of his contempt. Wilder and co-writer Walter Newman leech every droplet of sympathy from Tatum, but Douglas slowly reclaims some of the character's humanity in the small gestures and tonal shifts that conduct the film's tragic moods.

When Tatum learns about a man trapped inside a cave at a Native American roadside attraction, he sniffs a big story, which it's not. But it's one this crafty manipulator blows up into a running human interest sensation for the newspaper. Man stuck in cave. Only days to survive. Distressed wife waiting outside.

But wait. The wife, Lorraine, a snide bottle-blond dame (Jan Sterling), doesn't give a fig about her trapped husband. This is her chance to split. So when Tatum writes that she's "tear-stained" and "grief-stricken," she tells him, "You'll just have to rewrite me."

"A pig's eye," he snaps back. "This is the way it reads best, this is the way it's going to be."

As if anticipating journalistic fabulists Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, Tatum embroiders, adds rainbow sprinkles and maudlin frosting to his overbaked stories. It's good for business. Spectators flock to the desert site, camp out, throw picnics. Bands play, and presently a circus tent and Ferris wheel spring up in the dust (hence the film's alternate title "The Big Carnival," which the studio thought would draw better).

Deep in the collapsed cave, a poor guy (Richard Benedict) is breathing his last, half-buried, dust pouring in day by day like an hourglass of doom. (Echoes of last year's West Virginia coal mine tragedy, and the attendant press hoopla, are inescapable.)

Tatum loves it. His story mushrooms into a daily front page must-read. He scoops the city papers, licking his lips. Crossing the line most vilely, he goads rescuers to use a slower method with which to save the victim, just so he'll have more copy to type, more fame to cultivate.

"I've met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you, you're 20 minutes," Lorraine tells him. It's a snippet of the film's rhythmic, rat-a-tatty dialogue that pops with literary flair and the pulp jazz of noir. The script earned an Oscar nomination.

Hot off the critical and financial success of 1950's "Sunset Boulevard" — itself toxic cultural commentary (target: Hollywood) — Wilder got meaner and played rougher in "Ace," which, after years of being batted about the cinephilic ether, was released this week in a two-disc DVD package by Criterion.

No one honors films better than Criterion, and its "Ace in the Hole" layers on extras, including revealing interviews with Wilder and Douglas. Happiest of all is the dreamily sharp picture, a new, restored high-definition transfer of the black and white original that bears a jewely glimmer.

For fans whose collective adoration has made the Wilder classic a cult essential, through rare screenings and mucky VHS tapes, this isn't a DVD release. It's a celebration.

The Austrian-born Wilder was Hollywood's H.L. Mencken, a pitiless critic and satirist of American folly. He was smarter than his detractors, who stuck him with the monochromatic descriptive "cynic." Every good comedian is a cynic — peeves and healthy anger fuel the most durable humor — and the great ones are snipers, taking out targets with laser-guided precision. There's acid reflux in those laughs.

"Ace in the Hole" is considered Wilder's most cynical picture, unflinching and veined with gallows humor. That's saying a lot considering his darkly funny, morally challenging oeuvre: "Double Indemnity," "Stalag 17," "Sabrina," "Some Like It Hot," "The Apartment." If you don't register the sophisticated critiques of humanity and America in these pictures, you're only getting the half of it.

Encrusted in film noir notions of greed, amorality and self-propelled ruin, "Ace" traces the downfall of a man who didn't bite a dog, but bit off more than his soul could chew. Douglas' Tatum is as tragic as they get, the sap who, drunk on his own will, discovers redemption too late.

Some call it satire. If so, it's satire of the bleakest stripe. It is certainly "newspaper noir," a sub-genre marked by tough, ink-stained downers like "Sweet Smell of Success" and "Underworld Story" that expose the power of the press when it's gone sour and scheming.

Noir's window into American society is filthy but clear. "Ace in the Hole" presents more than a view through it. It offers a timely reflection, pushing the movie past a crack thriller and grim character study to something elegiac and urgent.