Ace in the Hole

Perhaps the most cynical director of Hollywood’s golden age, Billy Wilder relied on a revolving cast of writing partners to sugar-coat his unsentimental treatises on the human condition. One-off collaborators Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels must have shared his prickly temperament, however, as Ace in the Hole stands as the purest expression of the Wilder's caustic vision.

The innocents found in The Apartment and Some Like It Hot are nowhere in sight as an electric Kirk Douglas plays fallen newspaperman Chuck Tatum. Exiled from New York City and forced to take on a dead-end job with the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, he conspires to claw his way back to success by building a media circus around a local trapped in a collapsed cave. As grotesque hordes of tourists descend upon the site, Tatum's greed intensifies to unsettling effect in this savage and timely attack on an unscrupulous and corrupt press. [Lewis Porteous]