“Billy Wilder has a mind full of razor blades.” That’s William Holden’s assessment of writer-director Billy Wilder -- and few pictures illustrate Holden’s point better than Ace in the Hole (1951). Way ahead of its time and eerily prescient about ours, Wilder’s film casts Kirk Douglas as a ruthless reporter who milks a story about a man caught in a mine cave-in to advance his career. The film was inspired by a real-life 1925 incident in which spelunker Floyd Collins became tra

The 1950s bred a bumper crop of films about show biz. Some were light-hearted (Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon). Others told a darker tale (Sunset Blvd., All About Eve, A Star is Born). Lost in the shuffle is one of my favorites: The Bad and The Beautiful, starring Kirk Douglas as a ruthless film producer and the people whose careers he championed, including an alcoholic actress (Lana Turner), a Southern writer (Dick Powell), and a B-movie director (Barry Sullivan). "Peop

Out of the Past isn’t just a movie. It’s the archetypical film noir. At TCM.com, Felicia Feaster and John M. Miller break down the drama’s key draws: “Bitter, cynical, fatalistic and peppered with some of the best tough-guy dialogue in the genre, Out of the Past is a consummate example” of the hard-boiled flicks that flooded theaters in the 1940s and ‘50s. If you’re looking to launch your noir-ducation, it’s hard to top this on-brand fact I found at IMDB.com: Out of the Pas