Sunday, April 8, 2012

YOM Blog Review: Ace in the Hole

As a PR guy and former journalism major, I'm a sucker for a good newspaper movie, be it His Girl Friday, All the President's Men or The Paper. On top of that, I'm a sucker for a good Billy Wilder movie, be it comedy, drama or noir. Fortunately, Ace in the Hole delivers both.

Kirk Douglas stars as Chuck Tatum, a former big-time newspaper reporter who has charaded his way out of just about every top tier newspaper and is willing to do anything to get back on top. We meet up with Tatum on his way through Albuquerque, broke as a joke and looking to find a newspaper that will hire him and help him get back on top. As his car breaks down, he stumbles upon the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, a paltry rag that dabbles in nothing greater than hyperlocal community news and fluff pieces.

This is where we meet my favorite character of the movie, Jacob Boot, the daily paper's editor. For anybody familiar with Wilder's movies, you may recognize the character type: the wise, moral compass who silently knows the right moves to make but lets the protagonist make all the wrong moves. We see this with Dr. Dreyfuss in The Apartment and Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity. Boot can tell from the outset that Tatum is bad news, although he knows the writer has talent that will help him draw readers. And when things finally unravel, Boot is there, standing in silent judgment, saying "I told you so" without the character actually uttering those words.

After he is hired, we jump ahead about a year to see Tatum sitting stagnate at the news desk, complaining about the lack of excitement in Albuquerque, complete with "no chopped chicken liver, no garlic pickles, no Lindys, no Madison Square Garden, no Yogi Berra!" After reluctantly heading out on an assignment to cover a rattlesnake hunt, Tatum stumbles upon what he considers a journalistic goldmine.

A local named Leo Minosa has been trapped in a cave collapse while he is searching for ancient artifacts. Tatum, quite keen at manufacturing a story ("If there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog."), sees an opportunity and takes advantage of it, working the story from almost every possible angle.

Although the collapse is an easy fix, Tatum talks all of the big players involved into playing along with his story, promising them everything from increased tourism in the tiny town to more business to political leverage in the next election. Instead of simply shoring up the walls of the cave to get Leo out, he is able to get the contractor to drill down, giving crowds the illusion of work being done and Tatum time to begin feeding the story to the local paper and subsequent outlets nationwide. Although we don't get to know the contractor as well as other characters throughout the film, this relationship ends up being very important in how the movie progresses and in our protagonist's downfall.


As Tatum begins churning out his sensationalized version of theing story - one that, keep in mind, would have probably garnered two to three stories at most if reported on correctly and by another journalist - tourists begin showing up. As the days and the stories progress, the crowds get larger, eventually bringing in a mobile circus (unknown to Wilder, the studio actually changed the title to The Big Carnival right before its release; most airings of the movie and DVD releases use the original Ace in the Hole name).

The key to the charade working is the relationship Tatum depicts between himself and Leo, one he is able to keep exclusive (with the help of his new friend, the sheriff) from the rest of the big-time journalists - his former colleagues - who are trying to get a piece of the action. When Tatum first visits the trapped Leo, spirits are high. Leo, uncertain about what to expect, feeds off Tatum's enthusiasm. Their conversation is one of instant friendship. In fact, this relationship is the only seemingly genuine one our protagonist maintains throughout the movie...which makes how things turn out so emotionally disturbing.

Eventually, the success goes to Tatum's head, leading him to pick up the drink once more. At the story's peak, Tatum quits the Sun-Bulletin and sells his story to a New York newspaper editor for the chance to get back up on top. However, after being trapped for a few days, Leo's health drops rapidly, showing Tatum he has to fix things quickly. However, when he urges the contractor to stop drilling and shore up the walls, he finds out the vibrations have weakened the walls, meaning any attempts to do so would lead to collapse.

This is the point of the movie when Tatum gains a conscience. It's just a shame that it takes death for him to get there. From the point when Leo dies on to the end of the movie, Douglas plays the character masterfully. Throughout most of the movie, he plays Tatum as a guy who knows it all and who is willing to do anything to get it all; however, as a self-made and self-proclaimed hero who falls from grace onto his own sword, he is superb.

The tough part for the character though is, although he has realized the wrong he has done and the life he has caused to end, there are still a number of characters whose lives he has negatively affected. One, in particular, comes back to bite him in the worst possible way.

When we first meet Leo's wife, Lorraine, she is a bitter housewife, eager to find just about any excuse to get rid of what she views as her plain, leading-nowhere, too-nice-for-his-own-good husband. She is cold and almost emotionless and dreams in dollar signs. In many ways, she is Tatum's female counterpart, which is why they are instantly drawn to each other. Lorraine, who helps Leo and her father-in-law run a restaurant/gas station, is first lured by the prospect of the money that would come in from an increase in customers via tourists, who come in droves. One can't help but draw obvious parallels to The Postman Always Rings Twice (the movie version of which came out about five years before this film), wherein a ruthless drifter and equally ruthless wife of a diner owner plan to kill the woman's husband. As Tatum falls back into his drinking habit and her disdain for her husband and carelessness toward anything other than herself accelerate, their immoral personalities pique and seem to coalesce, eventually drawing them into a physical relationship.

These two characters bring out the worst in each other, and Tatum doesn't realize the effect he had on her until his conscience kicks in. Not only does she skip Leo's funeral ("I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons."), she rejects a present Leo asks Tatum to give her - a present he worked hard to buy for her and asked with his final breaths to be given to her. As he grabs her and they begin to quarrel, Lorraine snags a pair of scissors and stabs Tatum.

With that, Tatum stumbles back to the Sun-Bulletin office and utters the fantastic last words reminiscent of the ones he uttered when he first applied for a job with the paper: "How'd you like to make yourself a thousand dollars a day, Mr. Boot? I'm a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing." Then, as often happens, the anti-hero falls, presumably dead.

Essentially, I started watching this movie for Billy Wilder and stayed (well, I was sitting on my sofa) for Kirk Douglas. Douglas was one of the best of his generation at playing passionate intensity, whether it's for the selfish get-back-on-top reasons of this movie, the artistic drive of Rick Martin in Young Man with a Horn or the rebellious, steadfast nature of Spartacus. Although the other actors have their moments, Douglas really carries Ace in the Hole, which really brings another layer to the selfish Chuck Tatum

A note about Wilder: I love the Austro-Hungarian director's comedies, from Some Like It Hot to The Fortune Cookie. And his dramas are just as excellent because Wilder has a knack for injecting humor and wit in appropriate ways into dramatic situations. However, he doesn't just do it arbitrarily or out of character, instead doing it in a way that makes the situations seem human, almost as if humor is being used as a sort of stress relief.

Interest to Young Fans

As a PR person and a guy who is extremely interested in the journalism industry, all I could think about while I was watching this movie was how realistic it would or would not be for such a situation to occur nowadays. Take a story as serious as the trapped Chilean miners or as ultimately trivial as the balloon boy incident, and think about the media firestorms that surrounded both. Aside from both being near tragedies (the former obviously more than the latter), what both had that made them interesting were innate human interest angles.

The situation depicted in Ace in the Hole has the very same ingredients. Leo Minosa is exactly the prototypical human interest draw that excites media and their audiences. You can easily see how such a situation would be handled nowadays: constant stories across all media national and local, endless Twitter updates and the inevitable post-event interviews (that is, if Leo lives at the end of the tragedy) on the morning show and late night circuits.

To relate it back to the mission of this blog, young moviegoers would be interested in this film because of its human interest angle. When it comes down to it, we can imagine getting into such a story nowadays. We can imagine reading the stories written by Chuck Tatum in the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin.

I can also see this movie being a shoo-in movie filler for any college journalism or communication ethics class. The movie is an obvious example of what not to do and the dangers of cheating your way to the top. Of course, it paints a falsely negative picture of many journalists as ruthless, cold and emotionally detached. However, this was a common depiction that can be seen throughout many movies of this era (e.g. Inherit the Wind and His Girl Friday).

Of course, Kirk Douglas is one of those names that many young people may recognize, either on his own or in relation to his equally famous son, Michael Douglas. On top of that, the elder Douglas is still alive and delivered a pretty funny, though awkward, speech at the 2011 Academy Awards.

One aspect of the film that might be a turnoff for younger audiences is its truly grim take on humanity. Tatum is an antihero through and through. Although he realizes the errors of his ways by the end, that realization does not make him a better person; it merely means he has the capacity to identify guilt and the fact that he has singlehandedly caused a person - one that he genuinely seemed to like - to die.

This movie isn't for everybody as it is almost completely devoid of happiness for every character. There is nothing lighthearted about it. Perhaps this is why the film was such a critical and box office flop (although similarly depressing movies, such as A Place in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire, received Oscar nominations that same year).

However, it is an excellent piece of storytelling, one that shows how truly dangerous even a single person's selfishness can be.