Since before the invention of the printing press, news proprietors have enjoyed trading in such sensational tales of personal tragedy – often euphemistically described as “human interest”. This cutthroat world of scoop journalism was one with which filmmaker Billy Wilder would have been familiar.
By 1951, he was probably Hollywood’s most acclaimed writer-director, riding a wave of goodwill following his hugely successful 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. But he had spent his formative years in 1920s Vienna and Berlin as a newspaperman – in a 1980 documentary about him, Portrait of a ‘60% Perfect Man’, he recounted to film journalist Michel Ciment that much of this time was spent doing “dirty work” for scandal sheets. As film critic Molly Haskell tells BBC Culture, the young Wilder “was not above lying about his credentials or insinuating himself where he wasn’t wanted. All would be grist for the mill and inspiration for Wildean antiheroes in the darkly funny and excoriating films to come”.
It was during production on Sunset Boulevard when Wilder received a script treatment loosely based on the Floyd Collins cave-in, and must have seen something of himself in the cynical newspaper reporter at its centre. With co-writers Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman, Wilder crafted the concept into his most personal project yet. Ace in the Hole was to be a sermon on the director’s bleakly cynical world-view; a caustically satirical assault upon journalists and an amoral media industry. In the words of Ed Sikov, author of Wilder biography On Sunset Boulevard, the director “jumped at the chance to make a truly mean movie” – and this polemical fury has only been vindicated in the 70 years since its premiere.
The Wildean antihero of Ace in the Hole is Charles “Chuck” Tatum, a disgraced journalist hungry for a story to restore his reputation, played with ferocious intensity by a young Kirk Douglas. Having lost his desk at no less than 11 East Coast newspapers for his record of libel, adultery, and alcoholism, Tatum wanders into the diminutive offices of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin and offers his services. “I know newspapers backward, forward and sideways,” he boasts. “I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog.”