I Would Like to See It: Ace in the Hole

Ace in the Hole, as so many of Wilder’s films do, begins with a man down on his luck and out on his ass. Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is a reckless New York journalist with a long string of burned bridges behind him when he washes up at a small Albuquerque paper, hoping to latch onto a story big enough to propel him back to his career’s former heights. When he finds himself unexpectedly on the scene of a major cave-in which traps local man Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) hundreds of feet underground, he smells his chance and scrabbles desperately to take it. When the media circus around Minosa shows signs of petering out too early, Tatum takes steps to make sure that it doesn’t. Ace in the Hole is ruthless in its depiction of the reporter’s venal selfishness, mirrored by the blank, dissociative disregard of Leo’s wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling). He risks Leo’s life for his own gain the same way a juggler might toss another plate in the air during his act, the reality of all that flashing china suspended in the stasis of the moment, the spectacle, the story.

It’s easy to forget that the people in some dusty New Mexico backwater are just as real and vulnerable as the ones in Manhattan. You don’t have to look much further than the countless tweets about Red states “getting what they asked for” as COVID runs rampant in their hospitals to know Wilder had his finger on the pulse. Aren’t the people who tell stories more valuable, more special somehow, than the people who merely occupy them? Surely they’ll cooperate with the demands of those stories, live or die according to whatever makes for the best ending, hide away from any inconvenient spotlights until the moment of revelation is both expeditious and at hand. As Tatum begins to realize the horror brought on by his own hubris, though, the film becomes uglier, not easier to bear. His attempts to return the djinni to its bottle are undone before they’re underway. The story escapes from his control. It was never in it to begin with.

Ace in the Hole is a pure visual pleasure, the desolation with which it opens gradually filling up, then boiling over, then emptying out again in the space of a few seconds. All that sound and fury, all those eager eyes and hungry mouths bored the instant there’s nothing to look at, no misery and trepidation to eat. There’s an ugly locker room flippancy about it, especially in the verbal fencing between Tatum and his fellow reporters as they lambaste him for dropping the ball on the last few days of his career-restoring scoop. It’s all just softball to these people, who will never go underground in hopes of unearthing some 50-dollar relic, who will never reckon with the plundering of Native American tombs or die believing the curse of those same tombs, not the greed of a cowardly white man, is responsible for your predicament. When Tatum, driven by guilt and drunkenness, tries at last to confess, nobody wants to hear it. Forget his thousand dollars a day; you can have the truth for nothing, because that’s what it’s worth.