Copyright © 2021 Albuquerque Journal
SANTA FE – Seventy years ago, a cynical movie set and shot in New Mexico damaged a director’s career until later, film critics and historians say, when his dark vision of the media was proved correct.
“Ace in the Hole,” released in June 1951 and directed by Billy Wilder, depicts a down-and-out, former big city star reporter, Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), trying to make a comeback at the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin after his car breaks down in the city.
“The film, I think, is incredibly important, because I think Wilder’s assessment of the American media was the most prescient of all,”said Eddie Muller, the Turner Classic Movie host of “Noir Alley.”
Kirk Douglas stars in “Ace in the Hole,” a 1951 film by director Billy Wilder. The movie was shot and set in New Mexico. (Courtesy Paramount Studios)
“The fact that he did this in 1951 and the movie was a complete bomb and it almost, it didn’t wreck his career, but it certainly scared him off from writing original stories for the next eight or nine years,” Muller said. “I think time has proven that his vision was spot on.”
Tatum, while covering a rattlesnake hunt, hears of a man trying to dig for artifacts who gets trapped underground in Indian cliff dwellings. He seizes the opportunity and colludes with the local sheriff and co-opts the man’s wife to prolong the rescue while he milks the story for every column inch it’s worth.
The movie was partly shot about 20 miles west of Gallup off old Route 66 on a huge set that is said to be the largest built for any film except war movies. Wilder used a truck-mounted, hidden camera for Albuquerque shots. Cave-in sequences were filmed in studio.
Is it classic noir?
In the opening scenes, Tatum, trying to land a job, tells Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin Editor Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall), that he has read his paper. “It made me throw up,” Tatum says. “This is pretty Albuquerque.”
He tells the editor he normally makes $250 a week but can be had for $50 because of past transgressions involving a libel suit, an editor’s wife and alcohol.
“I can handle big news and little news,” Tatum says, “And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog.”
Arguments about whether the movie is classic film noir are besides the point, said Muller, who has been called the Czar of Noir.
The French applied the term film “noir,” or “dark,” in the 1940s to the cynical Hollywood crime dramas of the 1940s and ’50s, known for their low lighting and black-and-white visuals.
“I think it’s very significant as a film, less so as a film noir,” Muller, 63, said in a recent phone interview.
It doesn’t check the normal boxes for what’s considered a noir film “except the self-destructiveness of the lead character and his unbridled ambition and mean-spiritedness,” Muller said.
Some of the dialogue between Tatum and the trapped man’s wife, Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling), who wants out of the couple’s nowhere trading post business, is pure noir.
Tatum tries to convince Lorraine that it would look better if she would go to church during the “rescue.”
“I don’t pray. Kneeling bags my nylons,” she tells Tatum.
In another sequence, she sums up Tatum’s character: “I’ve met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you – you’re 20 minutes.”
Box office troubles
Muller said, “The culture pushed back very hard against the movie. It’s strong, and I don’t think people wanted to see American people depicted that way. I think (they) convinced themselves it was untrue and was an exaggeration.”
Santa Fe film historian Jeff Berg agreed.
“The first time they released it, it was a box office flop,” Berg said. “People had come to expect Billy Wilder to have comedies or musicals or things like that, and this was not that at all. It was deemed really, really cynical by a lot of viewers back in the day.”
It was rereleased and titled “The Big Carnival,” but it still failed.
Without giving away the movie’s ending, it can be said that “not well” would be a good guess.
The late critic Roger Ebert reviewed “Ace” when it was released on DVD in 2007. “There’s not a soft or sentimental passage in Billy Wilder’s ‘Ace in the Hole,’ a portrait of rotten journalism and the public’s insatiable appetite for it.”
Muller, a former art student, print journalist and bartender, opined on what a 20-year-old, seeing the movie for the first time today, would say. “Yeah, that’s the way it is, that’s the way the media works.”
California tragedy
Although some attribute the idea of “Ace” to the 1925 attempted rescue of a man trapped in a Kentucky cave, Muller said the genesis was a 1949 Southern California tragedy.
A 3-year-old girl tumbled into an abandoned well shaft close to her home, and the two-day rescue attempt was “the first live, breaking news TV spectacle in American history,” according to the Angel City Press website for its 2021 book “Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy That Transfixed the Nation.”
“Thousands of Southern Californians rushed to the scene,” the website says. “The Kathy Fiscus event invented reality television and proved that real-time television news broadcasting could work and could transfix the public.”
“That’s where the whole notion of the carnival (media circus) came into play, because they could actually hear her at the bottom of the well, but they couldn’t reach her,” Muller said. “And a true carnival sprung up around that site because they had to bring in very, very small people to try and get down the well, and this included circus performers and jockeys … and she died in the well.”
“This idea is really what inspired ‘Ace in the Hole,’ ” said Muller.
Berg said Wilder’s 1951 view of journalism – the Austrian emigre was a reporter during the 1920s and ’30s in Vienna and Berlin – stills resonates today.
“When I’ve shown that film in the past, Kirk Douglas’ character really holds up with some of the reporting and things that go on right now … he seemed to look ahead a little bit with that, with his behavior,” Berg said.
As fiction was eclipsed by reality over the following years, Muller said, Wilder must have been smiling.
“I think he was very pleased that over time how true his vision was,” Muller said.
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