Albuquerque, New Mexico. Reporter Chuck Tatum, who was fired from a dozen newspapers, finds a local newspaper office and persuades the editor in chief to hire him. A year later, Tatum is bored with trivial stories used as news, but as he was driven in a car by assistant Cook, they stop at a gas station run by Lorraine, whose husband Leo has been trapped in a cave after the walls collapsed. Tatum senses this is the big news he was looking for. He persuades the sheriff to listen to him, and uses the newspaper to attract a huge crowd of people to the cave. Tatum rejects en engineer's proposal of shoring the walls, and instead orders the rescue team to use a drill to reach Leo, so that the event will last for six days and he can earn more money from the news coverage for a New York newspaper. But Leo dies from pneumonia, just as the drill was 10 feet away from him. Tatum is disgusted by his profiteering of the news, and regrets.
One of Billy Wilder's darkest, most somber movies, without his usual sugar-coating of events or corny jokes, "Ace in the Hole" (also known briefly as "The Big Carneval") is a bitter dismantling and review process of journalistic ethics and distorted news reporting, contemplating how it can become hugely detrimental at the expense of the subject matter. Even though the film critics were at first repulsed by it, from today's perspective the story seems surprisingly modern and visionary for its time, a stinging dissection of conflict of interests and exploitation in journalism. The opening act, showing the anti-hero Tatum bored to death for having to report about trivial matters in New Mexico, has some fine dialogues (to illustrate his point, Tatum takes some papers and lists the events, such as a hurricane that "double-crossed them and went on to Texas"), which all leads to the main plot point, of his "discovery" of a major news in the form of Leo, a man trapped in a collapsed cave. Instead of accepting a proposal of an engineer of shoring the walls, which would mean the rescue would take 12-16 hours, Tatum rejects it and insists he should apply a drill method from the top of the cave, which would take six days, and "prolong" the news event, leading to Tatum accepting an exclusive news coverage for a New York newspaper for a 1,000$ per day. The event becomes more and more bizarre, since tourists start flocking to the rescue site, parking hundreds of cars out in the desert, and even assembling a carousel for kids, all under the feign that all the proceeds go to the Leo rescue fund. The observations are sharp, shocking and brave at the same time, showing how simple humanitarian events can get out of hand and get stuck in a neverending spiral of sensationalism. However, the movie is not perfect, since Tatum isn't a particularly interesting character all until the finale when he feels remorse, and Leo's wife Lorraine is underused. Some of the points against the media could have also been even sharper and more subversive, maybe even heading more towards the satirical. The dark ending feels very fitting today, wrapping up the events nicely, while Roger Ebert even included it in his list of Great Movies.
Grade:+++
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