“Tatum’s a hungry guy who bites off more than he can swallow,” Wilder explained with gusto. “What we have is an indictment of a reporter like Tatum who has recently been writing for cheesy tabloids.” Tatum has no scruples about sensationalizing a news event to sell more papers, Wilder continued. “On the other side, we have a publisher, an old-time newspaperman, Jacob Boot, who makes some telling points about honor in his profession.” Boot is the only individual in the film who stands for journalistic integrity.10
On July 6, 1950, just four days before the beginning of principal photography, the shooting script was finished. Wilder sent a copy to Joseph Breen, who responded that the script was lacking “a proper voice for morality” at the end.11 He was especially concerned about the portrayal of the local sheriff as corrupt. As Richard Armstrong notes, Sheriff Gus Kretzer has “all the scruples of the rattlesnake he carries around with him” in a cardboard box.12 Tatum knows how useful to the sheriff “the prolonged publicity of an extended rescue operation would be in the sheriff’s forthcoming election campaign.”13 He arranges to prolong the rescue operation by convincing Sheriff Kretzer to employ outmoded methods in digging Leo out. This will give Tatum more time to dramatize the rescue and the sheriff’s part in it. Breen was relatively easy on the script of Wilder’s nihilistic movie because Tatum ultimately pays for his transgressions with his life. But Breen and his advisers believed that “Sheriff Kretzer breezes out of the story a little too easily, considering the malice of his misdeeds throughout the story.” The censor expected Wilder to provide some additional dialogue, “which will make it clear that Kretzer will be answerable for his evil in the near future.”14 Wilder made a concession to Breen by having Boot declare that he plans to write an exposé about the sheriff, which will ruin Kretzer’s chances at reelection. Breen accepted this change.
Wilder signed Kirk Douglas for the pivotal role of Chuck Tatum. Douglas had played the career-making part of the unscrupulous boxer in Mark Robson’s Champion (1949); consequently he seemed right to enact the role of the selfish, scheming, cocky Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole. But Douglas had some misgivings about the character. When he approached the part, he wrote Wilder a letter, stating, “Look, Billy, I think I’m being a little too tough. . . . For God’s sake, Billy, please understand that I am not being one of those typical actors who is trying to write a screenplay.”15 Douglas thought the character was too unlikable and would forfeit audience sympathy. Wilder conceded that he had not made Tatum sympathetic but noted that he was an interesting, even riveting character. “He didn’t see it my way,” Douglas concluded, “so I did the best I could.”16 Douglas recalled that Wilder sent him “to work at the Herald Examiner as a rookie reporter for a week before shooting began.” He learned the ropes of the newspaper business during that week.17
The only substantial woman’s role in the picture was Lorraine Minosa, Leo’s slatternly wife, who has become increasingly bored with working in Leo’s souvenir shop. The part went to Jan Sterling, who had recently played a jailbird in John Cromwell’s Caged (1950). Sterling accepted the role of Lorraine because “it was the first really good part I’d had.”18 Richard Benedict, who usually played heavies in films like Maxwell Shane’s City across the River (1949), was called on to play Leo, one of the few sympathetic roles in his résumé.
Wilder stuck to his usual team behind the camera. Supervising editor Doane Harrison was with him as always, as were editor Arthur Schmidt, who was the cutter on Sunset Boulevard, and director of photography Charles Lang, who shot A Foreign Affair. Hal Pereira, who was production designer on Double Indemnity, was now head of Paramount’s art department, replacing Hans Dreier. At Wilder’s behest, Pereira appointed Earl Hedrick, who had designed the sets for The Lost Weekend, as production designer on Ace in the Hole. Pereira, of course, monitored Hedrick’s work, as Dreier had monitored his.
Principal photography began on July 10, 1950, with location work on the streets of Albuquerque around the offices of the Sun-Bulletin. The following day, the film unit moved to a barren stretch of land outside Gallup, New Mexico. It was there that Hedrick and his production team had set up Leo Minosa’s souvenir shop, known as the local trading post. The exterior of the cave in which Leo is trapped was not far away (the cave interior was built on a soundstage at Paramount). There was plenty of room in the arid landscape outside Gallup to accommodate the crowds of extras, recruited from the nearby towns, who were playing the curious tourists attracted by the mine catastrophe.
“I looked up the Floyd Collins story,” said Wilder. “There was a circus up there. There were hustlers trying to make a fast buck; they were selling hot dogs. . . . They composed a song.” So in Wilder’s film, throngs of morbid gawkers flock by the hundreds to the isolated outpost that is the site of Leo Minosa’s ordeal. The protracted rescue operation thus evolves into a carnival. The fairground that Hedrick designed encompassed concession stands, a Ferris wheel, a press tent, and a parking lot. It was one of the largest outdoor sets ever constructed for a movie: twelve hundred feet wide and sixteen hundred feet long.19
As for the lugubrious “anthem” composed for the event, Wilder took the liberty of having a song played while the rescue mission is in progress. The actual song inspired by Floyd Collins’s tragedy, “The Death of Floyd Collins,” was recorded by country singer Vernon Dalhart in 1925 and sold 3 million copies.20 For the song in the movie, “We’re Coming, Leo,” Wilder called on the songwriting team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, who had done a cameo in Sunset Boulevard, playing their hit song “Buttons and Bows” in a party scene. Wilder commissioned them to write “the worst song you can, with bad rhymes and everything else bad.”21 They obligingly came up with a promotional jingle designed to lure the sensation seekers to the site of the mine cave-in:
We’re coming, Leo, so don’t despair.
While you are cave a-hopin’
We will finally make an openin’.
The climax of the location shooting came on July 25. It was a helicopter shot of the media circus surrounding the cave; seven hundred extras participated, mostly local citizens. The location footage that Wilder accomplished in conjunction with Charles Lang is vivid and authentic. Wilder declared that paying close attention to milieu was the only way he could approach his characters, so that their situations came to life on the screen. Commenting on Lang’s cinematography, Wilder said that too many cinematographers—unlike Lang—“are working for the goddamned Academy Award,” and hence want to use a lot of elaborate shots. Wilder emphasized that he did not admire “fancy camerawork, with the camera hanging off the chandelier. That’s to astonish the middle-class critics.”22 Both Wilder and Lang wanted Ace in the Hole to have the unvarnished look of straight reportage. Their work on this film has what Manny Farber terms “a chilling documentary exactness.”23 Wilder wrapped up the location shooting on August 2, 1951, and the film unit decamped for the soundstages of Paramount in Hollywood. Filming ended on September 11; it had lasted a total of forty-five days—fifteen days shorter than the shooting schedule of Sunset Boulevard.
The composer available to score the picture was the Academy Award–winner Hugo Friedhofer (The Best Years of Our Lives). “It is not important for the audience to be aware of the technique by which music affects them; but affect them it must,” he once said. “The listeners should be aware subliminally how the score winds through the movie . . . and integrates the film experience.”24 Initially Wilder wanted Friedhofer to compose a more melodic score than the dissonant one Friedhofer wrote for him. Wilder “was upset that I hadn’t written a schmaltzy score,” Friedhofer remembered, perhaps because Wilder wanted the score to offset the harshness of the story line. “It’s a good score; but there isn’t a note of melody in it,” Wilder complained. Friedhofer answered, “Billy, you’ve had the courage to put on the screen a bunch of really reprehensible people. Did you want me to soften them?”25
The most reprehensible character in Ace in the Hole, of course, is Chuck Tatum, w
ho cajoles Jacob Boot into giving him a job as a reporter after he has flunked out as a journalist on some New York dailies. Tatum chafes at being exiled to a burg like Albuquerque. In fact, he looks on his job on the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin as a stopover in this “sun-baked Siberia” on his way back to the big time.
One of the routine assignments that Boot gives Tatum is to cover a rattlesnake hunt in the wilderness on the outskirts of town. Stopping for gas en route, Tatum pulls into Leo Minosa’s trading post, which is near an ancient Indian cave dwelling. Tatum learns that Leo, who entered the abandoned cave in search of ancient artifacts and relics to sell in his souvenir shop, is now trapped in a mudslide. Tatum immediately recognizes that the disaster has the makings of an exclusive news story for him to write—with a byline. Leo Minosa is Tatum’s “ace in the hole.” Indeed, Tatum’s scoop will result in headlines all over the country and will get him back in “the big leagues.” (Because Wilder learned English by listening to baseball games on the radio, his film scripts abound in baseball metaphors.)
Tatum enters the cavern and digs his way to the place where Leo is up to his waist in sand and shale. He assures Leo that help is on the way. The two-faced Tatum then convinces Sheriff Kretzer not to have the rescue party shore up the crumbling wall of the tunnel with timber, in order to extricate Leo from the mine shaft in a matter of hours. Instead, he persuades the sheriff to instruct the engineers to drill through solid rock from the top of the cave, a lengthy process that could endanger Leo’s life. This will give Tatum several days in which to build his big news story to produce maximum publicity. The sheriff agrees in return for having a sign posted at the cave entrance reading, “Reelect Sheriff Kretzer.” Tatum loses no time in phoning in the lurid story of the mine catastrophe to Boot: “Unless war is declared tonight, here is your front-page feature!” Afterward he says to himself, “Now that they’ve pitched me a big one, I’m gonna smack it right out of the ball park!”
That same day, Leo’s jaded wife, Lorraine, who has been looking for a chance to get free of her dead-end marriage, decides to desert her trapped husband. Lorraine finds life dull, living in a wasteland on the edge of town and clerking in Leo’s trading post. “We sell a case of soda pop a week,” she whines to Tatum, “and once in a while a Navajo rug.” Tatum intercepts her just as she is preparing to fly the coop, and he begs her to stay. He needs her to help him give his news dispatches some human interest. “Your husband is stuck under a mountain; you’re worried sick,” Tatum explains. “That’s the way the story goes.” Lorraine insists that she is leaving anyway. “You’ll just have to rewrite me,” she says with a shrug. Finally Tatum, shrewdly appealing to her greed, persuades her that the souvenir shop will become a gold mine once the press and the carnival promoters lure crowds to the cavern where Leo is entombed. Lorraine catches on quickly; soon she is charging admission to the cave site and hawking souvenirs at Leo’s trading post. At one point Wilder shows Lorraine in close-up biting into an apple, implying that she recalls Eve in the Old Testament. Lorraine, a temptress in this decadent Eden, coaxes Tatum into committing adultery with her.
Swarms of sensation mongers begin to converge on the fairground surrounding the cave, arriving aboard a train, “the Leo Minosa Special.” They are greeted by a band blaring out “We’re Coming, Leo,” the theme song of this media circus. A traveling carnival has set up shop near the cave. An announcer, speaking over a public address system, welcomes the crowds to “this community of tents and trailers”; a billboard assures the customers that “proceeds go to the Leo Minosa Rescue Fund.” Wilder’s satire is unrelenting.
Meanwhile, Tatum’s relationship with Lorraine has become strained. He says to her testily, “It’s Sunday. Aren’t you going to church?” She replies, “I don’t go to church; kneeling bags my nylons.” Wilder credited this gem of a line to his wife, Audrey—“How would I know a thing like that?” But Tatum is not to be deterred by Lorraine’s indifference. He insists that she attend the rosary service at the local Mexican church so he can get photographs of her for his press coverage as the “grief-stricken wife,” praying for her husband’s safety.26 (Tatum obviously chooses to overlook that Lorraine has made several passes at him.)
Becoming more impatient with Lorraine, Tatum snaps, “Wipe that smile off your face.” After all, she is playing the role of the anxious wife. “Make me!” she replies, defiantly. Tatum responds by slapping her across the face. Lorraine finally agrees to go to the Catholic service, but she adds, “Don’t ever slap me again, Mister.” Then she smiles. She says she is relenting only because Tatum wrote a flattering piece about Leo’s “loyal wife” in the afternoon edition of the Sun-Bulletin. “Tomorrow this will be yesterday’s paper,” he retorts, “and they’ll wrap fish in it.”
When Tatum pays another visit to Leo in the cavern, Leo expresses his growing anxiety that he cannot survive much longer. He asks Tatum to deliver to Lorraine a fur stole that he bought for her as an anniversary present, since he probably will not live to see their anniversary. Tatum is all too aware that Lorraine is not the devoted wife that Leo thinks she is, but he keeps that to himself. Instead he simply promises to do what Leo asks. But Leo’s wife takes one look at the mangy fur piece, which is all that Leo could afford, and sneers, “He must have skinned a couple of hungry rats.” Then she drops it on the floor with disdain. Tatum is appalled by the floozy’s cold indifference to her hapless husband. In a fit of rage, Tatum snatches up the stole, wraps it around her neck, and begins to choke her with it. Lorraine is nearly asphyxiated; in self-defense she turns on Tatum, grabs a pair of scissors, and plunges them into his stomach. When Wilder called, “Cut!” Douglas noticed that Sterling’s face was blue and she was gasping for breath. He exclaimed, “Good God, Jan! If I was squeezing you too hard, why didn’t you tell me?” She answered weakly, “I couldn’t, because you were choking me!”27
Tatum receives word that Leo is dying of pneumonia. Tatum is painfully aware that he has placed Leo’s life in jeopardy unnecessarily, just to get his scoop. He recalls that, during his last visit with Leo in the mine shaft, Leo requested that he bring a Catholic priest to administer the last rites. The guilt-ridden Tatum does so. As Leo recites the act of contrition, Wilder cuts to a close-up of the anguished, remorseful Tatum, who is the real sinner present. Leo, the poor chump, lies dying, still convinced that Tatum is his best friend. He will die without knowing about Tatum’s treachery. Compelling scenes like this one prevent the film from becoming a tasteless sideshow.
Inevitably, Leo expires in the dank pit with Tatum standing by. Tatum, who is gradually losing blood from his stab wound, goes outside the cave, grabs a microphone, and announces to the crowd that Leo Minosa is dead. “Now go home, all of you; the circus is over.” The carnival tent collapses and the gaping sightseers evaporate. Lorraine hits the road with her suitcase; she is last seen in extreme long shot, hitching a ride on the highway, aimlessly headed for nowhere in particular.
Meanwhile Tatum, filled with self-loathing, attempts to file his final dispatch, in which he confesses the part he played in Leo’s demise. But none of the wire services are interested; not even the Sun-Bulletin will print his confession. “He realizes, of course, that a dead man is no longer a news item,” comments Bernard Dick, and Leo Minosa is dead.28 Now that his grand deception has turned sour, Tatum realizes that he will never be able to tell the world of his gigantic hoax. The only one around to hear Tatum’s confession is Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur), a cub reporter who once looked up to Tatum as a role model. But now even Herbie is thoroughly disillusioned with Tatum.
Tatum lurches into the office of the Sun-Bulletin; he is leaking blood from his fatal wound, as Walter Neff does at the end of Double Indemnity. In a variation of the spiel he delivered to Boot at the beginning of the film, Tatum proclaims, “Mr. Boot, I’m a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing!” Tatum pitches forward toward the camera, which is positioned on the floor, and falls into an extreme close-up, dead. “
We dug a hole and put the camera there,” said Wilder. “We stood in the hole with the camera” so that Douglas’s face was only inches away from the lens when he collapsed. “The shot was always in my mind, but it wasn’t in the script. . . . That was one of the few times I went for a bold shot like that.” Wilder wanted to end on a powerful image of Tatum.29
“Wilder’s anti-heroes are never just heels,” writes Kevin Lally; “he understands their human frailty too well to deny them the potential for self-examination, no matter how repellant their behavior.” Tatum somehow senses that it is only right that he should pay for his crime by succumbing to the stab wound inflicted by Lorraine. The ending, Lally states, “is certainly not a cop-out.” A recurring theme in Wilder’s most powerful films is that of “a wretched opportunist wistfully seeking redemption.”30
When Ace in the Hole opened in July 1951, it flopped with a resounding thud. Several reviewers loathed the film, calling it an unwarranted attack on the integrity of the American press. Wilder personally was denounced as a cynic who had made a rancid movie “without a sliver of compassion for the human race,” which is gleefully portrayed at its worst. Wilder had a rattlesnake’s view of the world, said one critic; “this film has fangs.”31 Filmmaker Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World) emphasizes that “most critics considered themselves newspapermen and therefore within the target range of the movie’s furious contempt.” So it was not surprising that several reviewers excoriated Ace in the Hole. “Of course the rapacious hunger of tabloid news gatherers for their scoop,” he continued, “is nothing more than accurately presented in the movie.”32 Kirk Douglas noted that Wilder’s treatment of the news media became more credible over time because the excesses of the tabloid press became more familiar. “Newsmen will sometimes stretch their objective reporting to make a story more sensational,” he observed.33
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