Ace in the Hole at 75

“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 trapped inside the Kentucky cavern he’d been exploring. While engineers raced to free Collins, press and radio reports turned a local rescue effort into a national sensation. Over 18 days, 10,000 gawkers and souvenir hawkers joined the media scrum at the spectacle. And when officials finally located Collins, he was dead.

Eager to capitalize on the success of Sunset Blvd. (1950), and to prove he could flourish without his longtime writing partner (Charles Brackett), Billy Wilder reimagined his days as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin. He knew the news business, where the motto is: “If it bleeds, it leads.” So rather than make a sunny musical or comedy, Wilder let his cynical freak flag fly with the darkest film of his career. Or as he later admitted, “People went to see a cocktail. They got vinegar instead.”

Kirk plays Chuck Tatum, a cocky newshound who stumbles across the mine cave-in while working at a New Mexico daily. Like a heat-seeking missile, Tatum knows that if he can drag out the “human interest” angle on the trapped man, it could be his ticket back to a big-city newspaper. Soon, the town is overrun with morbidly curious tourists, carnival rides, and tchotchke salesmen out to make a fast buck.

Politicians hope to profit from the publicity. The victim’s wife sees his unfortunate accident as her exit ramp from an unhappy marriage – and she’s got Tatum’s number from the get-go. When he wants her to play the grieving spouse for the cameras, she snaps that praying isn’t her thing: “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons,” an acerbic line written by Wilder’s wife Audrey.

Today, the film is rightly considered a classic. Modern audiences love Wilder’s cynical dialogue and attitude. Filmmaker Spike Lee hails “one of the greatest final shots in cinema.” But in 1951, American audiences rejected Wilder’s pitch-black tale, which was a box-office bust. In fact, around Wilder’s studio, Ace in the Hole was nicknamed “Ass in the Wringer” for knocking the director off his perch as Paramount’s “golden boy.”

As malaprop-prone producer Samuel Goldwyn once said, “If people don’t want to go to a picture, nobody can stop them.” Despite its stateside flop, Ace did well abroad – some say that’s because European audiences had witnessed so many atrocities in WWII, they weren’t shocked by people behaving badly, as nearly everyone in the movie does.

Fortunately, Wilder bounced back a short time later with Stalag 17, a huge smash that earned Wilder’s pal William Holden a Best Actor Oscar. So even if Wilder called Ace “the runt of my litter” because it wasn’t a hit, he later tagged the film as “the best thing I ever did.”