Ace in the Hole

Director: Billy Wilder

1951 / 111min / 35mm

Fired from a string of newspapers thanks to his hot-headedness and weakness for the sauce, reporter “Chuck” Tatum (Kirk Douglas) gets one last chance at the dinky Sun-Bulletin of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and sees an opportunity to make the most of it when he hears about a local man trapped in a crumbling cliff dwelling, and turns his predicament into a media circus and a ticket back to the big leagues. Absent much in the way of “rooting interests”—Douglas’s newshound is a ruthless monster of ambition—and unrelenting in its savaging of the press and the pliable public it serves, Ace in the Hole was not, perhaps, the movie that the average American moviegoer of 1951 wanted, but it was the one they deserved.

“Ace in the Hole traffics in a kind of meta-hardboiled attitude meant to outdo film noir and excoriate the cynicism of the newspaper business at the same time. It’s a high-wire act that pleased no one when the film was released by Paramount Pictures. Its desert setting and its treatment of tragedy as carnival have exerted a weird influence on the American cinema to this day, most recently Wes Anderson’s sunny, softboiled Asteroid City. But Wilder’s bleakness is what stays with us in our new age of deteriorating journalistic practices.” —A. S. Hamrah

Distributor: Paramount

Introduction by writer A. S. Hamrah and a book signing following the screening on Saturday, January 31st

Part of n+1 Presents an A. S. Hamrah Double Bill