Elegy for the Edge:
Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, 1951
“The biology of the shadow has yet to be fully explored.”
Andrei Biely, 1913.
“We are a nation of hecklers. The most hard boiled, undisciplined people in the world.”
Billy Wilder, 1950
I think it’s fair to say, at least from my perspective, that someone has finally come along and fully studied the biology of the shadow. After their divorce as film making partners, both Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder went on to make solo efforts that pushed film noir even further towards an unexpected edge. Brackett produced Niagara with Marilyn Monroe in 1953 and Wilder created Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival) with Kirk Douglas in 1951. By a strange coincidence, unless it was synchronicity, just after my writing the section of the tumultuous story having to do with their final noir masterpiece together, Sunset Boulevard, I happened upon a TCM broadcast of Wilder’s first independent effort after their break up. I had seen Ace in the Hole several times previously of course, however it seldom resonated in quite the same way as it did while watching it from a retrospective point of view. So I sat back with a glass of wine and my notebook, prepared to venture once again into Billy’s post-Brackett domain. My instinctive initial response was even more severe than my first viewings had been.
It was one of the most depressing films I’ve ever seen. In fact, I could barely scribble any observations about it. But also, I must reluctantly admit, it was one of the most visionary, prescient and even prophetic: it is in fact a film noir masterpiece. In the end I found it necessary to watch Ace in the Hole spread out across a whole week of intermittent visits to the toxic and claustrophobic world it depicts. It’s a world we now all appear to occupy together, in reality, some 73 years later, and it’s no less toxic and claustrophobic when it has been translated into our digital society and transmitted globally via social media and the nebulous realm known as the Internet. In fact, no surprise, it’s far worse to have had circumstances transpire enough to transform this nasty media tale from the feverish imaginings of a gifted but problematic person into the everyday life that stares us in the face everyday via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, to name only a few of the many ways and means we have of alienating each other in real time.
That seemingly negative characterization that Wilder used to portray the American audiences for his films in the above epigram quote is all the more startling when one realizes that he was actually commenting with pride on the national character of his adopted homeland. He was also touting the state of mind, or of the heart, of the perceived audience for his new sensational film featuring Kirk Douglas in the most unflattering role of his career, as well as the imagined audience for the even more biting movies he planned to make in the near future, once all those past impediments, such as decorum or good taste perhaps, had been removed from his personal and professional trajectory. The film is virtually marinated in meanness and venom. In some ways it seems not only to be a film about an utterly cynical solipsist, a reporter played by Kirk Douglas, but also a film written and directed by one too, maybe even one for whom the close examination of occasional human flaws was a subtle form of character camouflage for his own.
Molly Haskell summed it up best for me in her piece in the Criterion Collection: “Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against a relatively honorable hero. This emotional snake pit, the darkest of Wilder’s dark meditations on American folkways, takes place under the relentless sun of the flat New Mexican desert. The noir is interior—inside a mountain tunnel where a man is trapped and suffocating, and inside the mind of a reporter rotting from accumulated layers of self-induced moral grime.”
Ace in the Hole, Released June 14, 1951. Paramount Pictures. Produced and Directed by Billy Wilder. Screenplay by Billy Wilder, Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels (from a story by Victor Desney). Cinematography by Charles Lang. Edited by Arthur Schmidt. Music by Hugo Friedhofer. Featuring Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Robert Arthur and Porter Hall. Duration: 111 minutes. For me, one stunning realization is the fact that since Sunset Boulevard came out in August of 1950 and Ace in the Hole followed it so rapidly in June of 1951, it seems obvious that Wilder must have been working on both projects simultaneously. To some degree, both films are morality tales, and both examine, from different angles, the power of celebrity and fame as it stealthily operates in our daily lives. The disgraced reporter, played so vividly and aggressively by Douglas, who will stop at nothing to attempt to resurrect his journalistic career by capturing the attention of the press for what he initially casts as a human interest story, is a poisonous cipher for the entire contemporary audience.
Accurately characterized as a biting examination of the often questionable and too intimate relationship between the media, the news items it reports and the techniques used to report on them, this film also demonstrates in a prescient manner just how easily a gullible public can on occasion be controlled and manipulated by the media charged with informing it of current affairs. The Chuck Tatum character, brought to venal life by Douglas, finds it impossible to do the right thing and simply let the trapped man who had innocently been searching a native American cliff dwelling for artifacts, be rescued in the most logical way. Rather than allow the engineers to shore up the existing passages and retrieve Leo Minosa in about 12 hours, Tatum convinces the local sheriff and contractors to take the much longer approach of drilling from the top of the mountain downward.
That decision, made partly taken to help the sheriff in his re-election campaign, stretched out the so called rescue to a full week instead of one day, during which the reporter continues to saturate the front pages of national papers in his vain quest to regain his former glory. In the meantime, the public has been whipped into a frenzy of combined schadenfreude and lurid soap opera, gathering in ever growing numbers of cars, trailers, tents, and visitors (who are being charged admission to this tawdry circus atmosphere) all of which has an impact on the livelihood of the entire town.
Jan Sterling
Tatum, who has been wounded in an altercation with the trapped man’s wife, played by the magnificent Jan Sterling, slowly comes to his senses when he realizes that the drilling method prolonged his story but shortened Leo’s life. He remorsefully tries to confess to murdering the trapped man in order to help his exclusive story grow in scope and scale but his editor cuts him off and fires him before he can write a new and more truthful story about what has happened during the week since the cave in. Sterling also had one of the greatest lines ever in a noir movie, when asked if she ever goes to church, “No, kneeling bags my nylons.”
Responses to the film’s bleak, misanthropic, anti-social undertones were loud and vociferous in their condemnation, with Bosley Crowther of the New York Times calling it a masterful film, but chastising Wilder, who “has let his imagination so fully take command of his yarn that it presents not only a distortion of journalistic practice but something of a dramatic grotesque, badly weakened by a poorly constructed plot, which depends for its strength upon assumptions that are not only naïve but absurd.” The Hollywood Reporter declared it “Ruthless and cynical, a distorted study of corruption and mob psychology that is nothing more than a brazen, un-called for slap in the face of two respected and frequently effective American institutions—Democratic government and the free press.”
My main observation in this regard that it is probably true than such was the case in 1951, but what of the brave new world of right-wing extremist news journalism of 2024? It is right at home in the polluted industry exemplified by social media and propaganda ‘news’ networks for whom profit and viewership has replaced authenticity and accuracy in reporting. In our current world of fake news purveyors accusing everyone else of being fake news, is this sad and seedy tale not just another day at the office? I’d hazard a guess and say that this dark, twisted fable of Billy’s was downright prophetic.
And yet despite the critical and popular rancor, the film still garnered for Wilder an Academy nomination for best story and screenplay, and a Golden Lion for the director at the Venice Film Festival, which also bestowed its prestigious International Award for Best Director on Wilder. In 2007, the often astute Roger Ebert went out on a limb and stated that “Although the film is fifty six years old, I found while watching it again that it still retains its power. It hasn’t aged because Wilder and his co-writers, were so lean and mean with their dialogue and Kirk Douglas’ energy and focus is almost scary. There is nothing dated about his performance. It’s as right now as a sharpened knife.” Of course it is, because we all now live in its sordid world everyday. And in a kind of redemption of sorts, in 2017 the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress selected it for preservation, citing its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance. Its shadows continue to lengthen and its gritty message continues to resonate with our reality in shocking ways.
Ace in the Hole is also a movie with a series of firsts for Wilder, who by this time was beginning to regularly be referred to as an auteur: the first time he was commanding a picture’s creation as the writer, producer and director; the first film he made subsequent to his break up with longtime collaborator Brackett; and also, less expected by him, the first time a Wilder film was both a critical and a commercial failure. It’s too easy to say that the film was ahead of its time and somewhat psychic, though these things are true, and there was more to the public and industry’s rejection of his first solo venture than merely being dazzled by a genius who sees the future. They were also experiencing considerable nausea, of the existential variety, at their exposure to something so dark, so menacing, and so unremittingly venal.
Many have observed that once he climbed to the top of the award winning Hollywood mountain, Wilder planned to stay there completely on his own terms, without any partners to stand in his way, as he shifted his focus from the merely noir aesthetic of Sunset Boulevard to one of utterly bleak and total blackness being unveiled via Ace in the Hole. Secondly, all of the film industry, and most of the more avid cinema buffs, were well aware that Wilder had availed himself of the skills of varied screenwriting teams, and that now he was on his own. It was clear that Wilder always needed to have another writer in the office with him, whether or not he accepted their input. It was equally well known that, for whatever reason, he was practically unable to write alone, by himself, in solitude, without a sounding board against which to bounce ideas back and forth.
One such writer, Walter Newman, was an inexperienced twenty year old radio scribe whose play Wilder had listened to on his car radio one night, was called to Paramount and invited to co-write Ace in the Hole with Wilder and Lesser Samuels, an ex-newspaperman and studio contract writer. With somewhat lesser mortals at his beck and call, the newly minted auteur was able to make short shrift of the composition process, one that featured a cold hearted examination of human beings on their worse possible behaviour. Clearly, Wilder was giving full rein to his inherent misanthropic tendencies as he explored the outer edges of both self-serving media drones as well as the average American, who he portrayed as an enthusiastic sap capable of turning a tragic event into a circus-like bonanza of heartless entertainment.
Shot pretty much entirely on location in New Mexico, it almost has the accidental feeling of a documentary as it relentlessly traces the steps by which a man trapped in a mountainous cave-in is monstrously used as a prop in the inflation and sustaining of a news story. It still shocks us even today, and must have completely blown the minds of both movie-goers and critics alike back in 1951, when it arrived like a festering wound on the unprepared screens of America. One viewer described having felt like they had been beaten up by the movie, which was critically lambasted in the press and roundly rejected by audiences. This was the project by which Wilder came to be known as such a cynical artist, and he was denounced for a gratuitous assault on the newspaper and television industries at the same time.
Wilder, stung by the almost universal disdain and displeasure at his first solo effort, was adamantly Billy and dug in his heels even deeper. “Fuck them all—it is the best picture I ever made.” But the damage had been done, though even he shouldn’t have been surprised at the reaction, which is often what happens when all limitations imposed by the cooperation of other professionals are removed and only the solitary ego of the auteur matters. Wilder even had a new secretary at Paramount, Rosella Stewart, an innocent who replaced Helen Hernandez when she decided to move with the more even tempered Brackett when he left Paramount for Twentieth Century Fox. Unlike Hernandez, Stewart would have been unaware, apart from his reputation, of Wilder’s quirks, foibles, weakness or strengths, other than his prior acclaim, and she would have been much less likely to cast questioning glances at his barking.
Paramount studio itself however, being well aware of his history, both the good and bad parts, was much more forthcoming in its brusque judgments about the direction in which Wilder was heading. He began to imagine people looking the other way when he entered the studio cafeteria, and started counting the former friends who were less enamored of his new footloose and independent persona. His studio bosses were not enchanted by the consensus of critical assessment that there had never been an American film quite like this one before. That much was very true, and in true capitalist fashion, they responded in the usual way, which strained their relationship yet further.
Wilder had a contract with them that stipulated that he had the right to determine the final cut and the movie’s title, but “Without my consent and without even consulting me, having decided Ace in the Hole was a bad title, changed it to The Big Carnival. Naturally enough, in this case at least, the director’s title was the far better one. Wilder never forgot this slight, or the corporate reaction to his craftsmanship, “That picture, Ace in the Hole, lost me power at the studio.” His spleen continued to rule his character, to the extent that people interacting with him began to realize that there was more than one Wilder. As Zolotow assessed his character armor: “It was really Billy’s own fault if the critics saw only the spleen. There is coarseness in his films, as there is in his nature. And in his films. But when he talks to the press it is only cynicism he displays. Is this the real Billy Wilder? Yes. Is it the only Billy Wilder? No. There are many ‘real’ Billy Wilders.” One of his early and chief biographers, that author searched in vain for what he referred to as the source of Wilder’s ruling passions. “There had to be—there ought to be—some crucial event, some series of occurrences, perhaps, which had been so traumatic in nature that they had engendered this powerful thrust of his imagination. I could not find it.” That author has shared an encounter with Wilder’s daughter Victoria, who intimated her own need to comprehend her father’s challenging character. “ I hope you will explain him to me in your book. I love him but I don’t understand him. Never did. Wonder what made him the way that he is?” Join the club.
Bob Landry / Wilder savouring the joys of analog cinema
Two additional biographers of Wilder have wondered the same thing, in divergent ways that I think come close to the target of comprehending his complexities. I applaud their work, only slightly because it tends to concur with my own conjectures, and find that Some Like It Wilder, by Gene Phillips, and Dancing on the Edge, by Joseph McBride, each add a certain clarity to the Billy Wilder conundrum. I have long suspected that Wilder was not so much a hardened cold cynic as a drastically disappointed romantic, one of the central thrusts of Phillips’ study, and this fresh angle of inspection helps to explain many of the man’s obscurities. Likewise, the astute contribution to Wildermania by McBride, who draws our attention to issues relating to the Jewish identity in Hollywood, and indeed America at large, in a way which emphasizes my contention that Wilder suffered from a distinctive kind of survivor guilt, on top of his post-traumatic stress.
Even though Time Out called it “A diatribe against all that is worst in human nature with moments of pure vitriol.” and TV Guide called it “a searing example of Billy Wilder at his most brilliantly misanthropic.”, while Slate opined that “If film noir illustrates the crack up of the American dream, then Ace in the Hole is an exemplar of the form.” all three press outlets still agreed to designate it a movie that stands as one of the great American films of the 1950’s. Wilder himself eventually got quite used to referring to Ace in the Hole as “the runt of my littler”, although the sting of such overwhelmingly negative critiques had to have disappointed him great
Critical assessment of Wilder’s profoundly disturbing first solo venture, and of his work in general, was also fleshed out very publicly in print at the time of the controversy surrounding his first post-Brackett movie. The prestigious film journal Hollywood Quarterly, later to evolve into Film Quarterly, published a fascinating pro and con attack and defense of Wilder’s first solo film, and by extension of his entire ethos, in their Fall 1952 issue, when the controversy was still hot and was then further stoked by a rather unusual editorial decision for that highly respected supplement. The Quarterly may have bitten off more than it could chew when it commissioned Herbert Luft, a film editor and research/production affiliate in addition to being a screenwriter and producer of television films, to create a profile of Billy Wilder.
According to Brackett’s diary Ace in the Hole, a picture with which he had no connection, told the story of a ruthless heel. “No one was asked to like or admire him. The story of him using the victim of an accident to rebuild his shattered career was not a pretty one, nor was it presented as what any newspaperman would do under the circumstances, but it did point up certain cynical qualities of the press and certain appalling habits of behaviour in crowds who gather to watch events charged with misery. It was in the vein of American self-criticism which has been a major current in national literature since the days of The Octopus, The Pit and The Jungle. Because he was born in Austria, was Billy Wilder to be excluded from that vigorous and important trend of critiquing America’s fascination with the lurid aspects of Yankee life? I don’t think so.”
Eventually, though he at first found it almost unbearably cynical, Brackett came to realize and accept that Ace in the Hole as one of Wilder’s greatest artistic achievements, and one of his finest explorations of dark film noir narratives, despite the blinding sun of it southwestern locale. It was, as Molly Haskell astutely called it, ‘noir in broad daylight’. History has also shown it to be shockingly prescient, almost prophetic in its pre-digital examination of what would become our absorption in online sensationalism. But for me, the most important revelation of this phenomenally powerful film, and perhaps regarding the whole rich career of Billy Wilder, is a fresh assessment of what made him who and what he was: a disappointed romantic.
Applause Books on Film (Bloomsbury)