Ace in the Hole (1951)

Peter's nite

Editor and Publisher Magazine, "The Best Movie About a Reporter Ever":

Large segments of America may distrust or despise them, but Hollywood still loves reporters. They have served as compelling heroes and villains since the dawn of cinema. You only have to go back to 1931 to enjoy "Five Star Final" (if you can find it), with Boris Karloff starring as the shifty journalist. Between the birth of the talkies and today, Hollywood has produced hundreds of films that revolve around newsrooms. But somehow, until last month, I had missed the best, Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole."
Rarely seen in recent years, the movie finally came out on DVD this past summer. About 15 years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing the very friendly (and, yes, hysterically funny) Wilder for a book I was writing on a California political campaign in which he played a tiny role, and he recommended this cult classic during one of our talks. If you haven't seen it, rush out to get it, or do that Netflix thing.

Although something of a box office flop in 1951 — and later released under a new title, "The Big Carnival" — it was way ahead of its time in anticipating the feeding frenzy of media coverage today. But like Larry David and "The Simpsons," it is an equal-opportunity mocker, poking malicious fun at everything from gullible common folk to the police. Its most famous line comes from the no-nonsense wife of its chief victim, who says she doesn't go to church because "kneeling bags my nylons."
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Yes, I'm aware that yellow journalism and media circuses existed long before this. In the film, Tatum even mentions a real-life precursor — the Kentucky cave-in in 1925 that made W.B. Miller of the Louisville Courier-Journal a household name (and landed him a Pulitzer). State troopers with bayonets had to hold tourists back at the Sand Cave, and that victim perished, also.

But "Ace in the Hole" still stands as a savage — and highly entertaining — reminder of one reason the media has lost so much standing. To be sure, Hollywood has fallen just as far: They truly don't make movies like this anymore.

Molly Haskell via Criterion:

The 1951 movie, fascinating in the sweep and savagery of its indict­ment, and a flop when it opened (and again when it was released as The Big Carnival), points to the direction noir would take in the fifties, hiding in broad daylight in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk. But if Hitchcock diabolically upended our expectations of the lead­ing man, Wilder went much, much further. This satire of the media circus that would envelop us all goes beyond noir into saeva indignatio, and beyond Swift into something more intensely and disturbingly personal. Rarely, if ever, have there been such brutally antipathetic leads in a mainstream film as Kirk Douglas’s scoop-or-die reporter and Jan Sterling’s breathtakingly callous victim’s wife. However prophetic Wilder’s vision of a press and a public drunk on sensation, this issue ends up seeming almost peripheral to two main characters so monstrous in their mutual, and mutually despising, selfishness that it’s astonishing the movie got released at all.

Fresh from his star-making turn as the self-promoting prizefighter in Cham­pion (1949), a ferociously determined Douglas gives one of his great over-the-top, sadomasochistic performances as Chuck Tatum, bent reporter (a liar, a fabricator, an adulterer just begin to count the ways), desperate for a scoop, a ticket back to a big-city newspaper, who winds up in the hick town of Albuquerque. Before landing him in the newspaper office, an extended opening scene features one of cinema’s great entrances: Douglas’s convertible, having broken down in the desert, is being towed in to the local shop as he sits like a catbird in the driver’s seat, reading a newspaper, with the camera tracking alongside. The image is that of a man both crippled and defiant: to be carless—see Sunset Boulevard (1950)—is to be emasculated, but this born opportunist and exploiter has turned the truck driver into his charioteer. Having now acquainted himself with the local paper, Tatum strides into its storefront office and, with characteristic chutzpah, condescends to the locals—“How,” he says to a Native American, and sneers at the secretary’s handmade sampler “Tell the Truth”—before penetrating the office of the kindly editor-publisher, played by Porter Hall. In an outrageous Wilderian aria of simultaneous self-promotion and self-contempt, he makes his pitch: “I can handle big news,” he boasts; all he needs is “just one good beat,” as he comes down in price—“Fifty dollars . . . Forty-five dollars.” There is something already frightening, if funny, in the mixture of self-abasement and aggression. It’s the self-abasement that is the aggression, as if he’s getting the jump on you by saying the very worst, bragging about what a liar he is, even as he confesses each sordid detail of his firings from various newspapers. He talks himself into and out of a job several times over and is finally hired for sixty bucks.

As he settles in, we can’t help but respond in some degree to his abject down-and-outness, his hunger and desperation, not to mention the New York hustler vibe he brings to this white-bread environment, where there are no pickles, no chopped liver (a sly reference to Douglas’s—and Wilder’s—Jewishness?), no Yogi Berra, where never is heard a discouraging word and the homemade “Tell the Truth” sampler reeks of small-town naïveté.

Guy Maddin via Criterion

Wilder’s effects and Douglas’s priapic performance are in the ser­vice of a story that was lambasted as hopelessly cynical by the critics of the day. Since most critics considered themselves news­paper­men and therefore within the target range of the movie’s furious contempt, this makes a certain sense. But the picture isn’t cynical at all, it’s spot-on! There’s no denying it travels darker territories: the secret wish of a bored housewife, for example, to have a hundred tons of rock dumped on her Baby Duck–and–Minute Maid husband, or the parents happy to offer their children ringside seats to death because it could be “very instructive.” Of course, the main theme is the rapacious hunger of tabloid news gatherers for their scoops, and of a public for blood (an appetite in this case as sexy and naked as it was in Caesarean times). But these things are nothing more than accurately represented in the movie. The earnest young shutterbug who starts the picture as Tatum’s nemesis is utterly corrupted by him within seconds; the lad’s whiplash transformation from annoying goody-goody to sycophantic ponyboy puts the Oscar-winning mutative wizardry of Rick Baker to shame. Others within Tatum’s orbit—the sheriff and the contractor, particularly—undergo Fredric March–like personality shifts as well, though the cave rat’s wife, the perfectly cast Jan Sterling, appears to have come pre-Hoovered of all scruples. By the time the Great S&M Amusement Corp. rolls in, poor, mad Minosa is clearly doomed to die like a dog in his cave.

Wikipedia:

Jan Sterling (April 3, 1921 – March 26, 2004) was an Academy Award-nominated American actress. She was born Jane Sterling Adriance in New York City, into a prosperous family. Sterling was educated in private schools before heading to Europe with her family. She was schooled by private tutors in London and Paris, and was enrolled in Fay Compton's dramatic school in London.

As a teenager she returned to Manhattan, and billed with such aliases as Jane Adriance and Jane Sterling, began her career by making a Broadway appearance in Bachelor Born, and went on to appear in such major stage offerings as Panama Hattie, Over 21 and Present Laughter. In 1947, she made her movies debut in Tycoon, now billed as Jane Darian. Seldom cast in passive roles, Sterling was at her best in parts calling for hard-bitten, sometimes hard-boiled determination. Actress Ruth Gordon insisted she change her stage name and the two hit upon Jan Sterling.

In 1948 she broke into films as the scheming floozy who tries to take the baby of Academy Award winner Jane Wyman's character in Johnny Belinda, but ultimately ends up helping "Belinda" (Wyman) by clearing her of murder. Shuttling between films and television, she showed up in nearly all the major live anthologies of the 1950s, playing in "bad girl" film roles in Caged (1950), Mystery Street (1950), The Big Carnival (1951), Flesh and Fury (1952), The Human Jungle (1954), and Female on the Beach (1955), while making a more sympathetic impression in Sky Full of Moon (1952).

In 1954 Sterling was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The High and the Mighty. Also the same year, she travelled to England to play the role of Julia in the first film version of George Orwell's 1984, despite being several months pregnant at the time. During the following years, she appeared regularly in movies like Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, Kathy O, and The Female Animal. She retired from films in favor of the stage in 1969 and returned before the cameras in 1979 to portray Lou Henry Hoover in the TV miniseries Backstairs at the White House.

Married and divorced to actor John Merivale in the 1940s, Sterling's career slipped down after the death of her second husband, actor Paul Douglas, in 1959. In the 1970s, she entered into a long lasting personal relationship with the late actor and American expatriate in the UK, Sam Wanamaker, but they never married.