Ace in the Hole (The Big Carnival)

1951 movie with one too many titles

Rating: 18/2o

Plot: Newspaper man Chuck Tatum's career is in the toilet, mostly the result of extracurricular activities that have gotten him fired from big-city publications. He attempts to get a fresh start with a dumpy paper in Arizona where he hopes for a big story to put him back on the map. On his way to cover a frog-jumping competition (or something), he stumbles upon a guy trapped in a mine. He quickly realizes that engineers can get him out quickly, but Tatum, along with the man's wife and the sheriff looking to be re-elected have reasons to keep him in there longer. The nothing-Arizona town turns into a circus.

Kirk Douglas overacts in this. Actors who read their lines while sparks come out of their eyes usually are. Douglas chews up the scenery, chomping down on the Arizona desert and gnawing on the newspaper office. He's at the center of nearly every scene in the movie, so that could have been a problem. Instead, his performance is so full of energy and he gets such great lines to say ("I could do wonders with your dismembered limbs"; "If there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog") that you not only get used to it, but you actually start to like him as this really despicable figure. I like how you can tell that Douglas, even when he's just standing there or moving from point A to point B, has got his mind running. You can see the conspiratorial gears grinding in his mind right through his eyes when he's talking to Jan Sterling's character or Ray Teal as the sheriff. Billy Wilder gives us a ton of great shots in this film, and one great one has all three of those characters' faces on screen while they're listening to talk about a drill. They all have that gears-a-runnin' look in their eyes. I also like a shot near the end where Tatum's shadow covers the character who happens to be speaking--Jimmy Olson. It almost looks like a mistake, but it perfectly symbolizes the completion of Tatum's corruption of Jimmy Olson. Fur on a rocking rocking chair, and a final shot of the trapped guy's dad after everybody clears out are also terrific. Ace in the Hole, or whatever the hell you want to call it, is a darkly humorous, well-paced, cynical, and ultimately tragic story with an eerily contemporary message. It's ahead of its time and is right up there with Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, and Stalag 17. Man, what a director.

Ace in the Hole trivia, courtesy of imdb.com: Chuck Tatum has a line where he mentions Yogi Berra. Yogi Berra was a baseball player for the New York Yankees. I probably didn't need to tell you that, but if Kirk Douglas was one of my five-and-a-half blog readers, he wouldn't have. In a letter about the line he wrote to Billy Wilder, Douglas asked, "What the hell is a Yogi Berra?"

Bonus Shane trivia: I liked a line in this about a guy wearing both a belt and suspenders so much that I stole the idea for a writing project I'm working on with my own conspirator. I did this unapologetically because that's the type of cat that I am.