Ace in the Hole
Criterion, $39.95
“I’ve met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you, you’re 20 minutes.” So sneers Jan Sterling at Kirk Douglas during 1951’s Ace in the Hole, and you can almost hear Billy Wilder yukking it up softly off-camera. That the peerless Viennese filmmaker (1906-2002) followed the second of three Best Screenplay Oscars for Sunset Boulevard with this lesser effort – nevertheless nominated for another one – on his way to Stalag 17, Sabrina, and Some Like It Hot only cements the interest surrounding this relative obscurity. A box-office dud retitled by the studio as The Big Carnival becomes precisely that as Wilder’s prescient media indictment dominoes toward a close encounter of the cinematic kind. Douglas’ exiled big city reporter – seeking redemption in the “sun-baked Siberia” of New Mexico where a sad sack profiteer becomes trapped inside a mountainous rock slide – ringmasters his exclusive front-pager into a circus. Unencumbered by all but one ethical tenet, “Bad news sells best because good news is no news,” Douglas musters a full head of antihero steam with all the humility of Charles Foster Kane. “This is my story,” he threatens the election-year sheriff. “I want to keep it mine.” All of the characters help themselves eventually, noir coloring everything until the last frame. Disc two turns up an hourlong audience with the maestro in 1980, all six of Wilder’s Oscars huddled together high on an office bookshelf, plus a 30-minute excerpt from a 1986 American Film Institute forum, and a brief interview with Douglas. “A very, very harsh experience,” says Wilder of Ace in the Hole, the first he took on the writing, producing, and directing all at once. Sunny side up, even in his comedies, never suited him.
Also Out Now
No Way Out (20th Century Fox, $14.98): Ace in the Hole co-screenwriter Lesser Samuels took home an Academy Award nomination along with writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz for Sidney Poitier’s baby-faced 1950 film debut as a black doctor enduring the n-bombs of petty thief Richard Widmark. Both leads transcend the noir’s at-times gripping hysteria.
Romancing the Stone/Jewel of the Nile Special Edition (20th Century Fox, $29.98): Before his father’s grimace became his own, Michael Douglas’ romantic side indulged in tequila, marijuana, and Kathleen Turner, first in the jungles of Colombia and then in the desert. Deleted scenes and new featurettes enliven this two-disc set’s favorite fortune hunters.
This article appears in July 20 • 2007.
