Ace in the Hole (1951)

After my haircut last night (at a salon where people keep asking me if this is my natural hair color), I went over to the Film Forum to see "Ace in the Hole", another Billy Wilder flick. From the Time Out New York reviews, I was expecting something slightly different.

The movie was pretty good, with some very funny lines and some biting observations about how people can be bought and how a humanitarian relief effort can be twisted for self-glorification, but I still was a bit disappointed. Among other things, I expected more of a metaphorical media circus instead of a literal media circus (in the movie, a huge carnival is installed on the side of a cave collapse disaster).

Most disappointing of all: the antihero reporter at the center of the plot was somewhat less resourceful than he should have been. He couldn't figure out how to milk a disaster in which the victim died (albeit as a result of his own interference in the rescue operation)??? What kind of reporter is that??? He had a self-defeatingly narrow conception of what the newspaper-purchasing public would want to read; why wouldn't the public want to know all about the wife/widow who couldn't wait to get out of her marriage and stuck around only to make money while the rescue operation brought in zillions of tourists to finance her getaway?

Perhaps Mr. Wilder pushed the envelope of cynical satire as far as he could in 1951; perhaps we have just seen so much worse, in reality, in our time, that his satire has lost its edge.

But I think the satire is somewhat defanged as well, even in the movie's own terms, because there is a good and wholesome newspaperman and publisher -- one whose offices are decorated with framed home-made needlepoint works stating "TELL THE TRUTH" -- who offers the antihero a position and welcomes back the prodigal young photographer who cast his lot with the antihero. At the end of the film, the antihero collapses on the floor of that newsroom, destroyed by his greed and manipulations, a physical manifestation of his moral collapse. There could have been redemption for him, but he rejected it. It is a story of an individual's failure, not an indictment of the industry, and that weakens the point.