| |
|
|
|
Ace in the Hole - Criterion Collection
|
List Price: $39.95
Our Price: $24.99
Your Save: $ 14.96 ( 37% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Criterion
Starring: Kirk Douglas
Directed By: Billy Wilder
|
Average Customer Rating: 
|
|
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 0715515024723
Format: Black & White
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 2
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2007-07-17
Running Time: 111
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: 1951-06-29
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
One of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker, Academy Award-winner Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole is legendary for both its cutting social critique and its status as a hard-to-find cult classic. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter caught in dead-end Albuquerque who happens upon the story of a lifetime-and will do anything to ensure he gets the scoop. Wilder's follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker vision, a no-holds-barred expose that anticipated the rise of the American media circus.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: See Kirk Douglas act like a total ace-hole!
Comment: In 1950 Billy Wilder was riding high. Fresh off the enormously successful Sunset Boulevard, the German-born Wilder decided to make a very different film; one somewhat critical of the society of his new home, the United States. That film was called Ace in the Hole.
The movie concerns Kirk Douglas as a down-on-his-luck reporter who has been fired from just about every major newspaper in the country. Starting with New York, he's gone from large market to small, and now has ended up in Alberquerque. He's a self-described $250 a week reporter, but settles for $60 a week, and makes it clear at one point he'd be willing to take even less.
But his character, Chuck Tatum, has dreams. Yes, he does. He dreams that one day, the Great Story will drop into his lap. A story that will let him write his way out of the situation he's in, one that will let him write his own ticket and get back to New York.
That Great Story drops into his lap one day when, while on the way to cover a rattlesnake hunt, he stops at a gas station and finds out there's a man trapped in a nearby cave. He boldly goes into the gave, meets Leo Mimosa (Richard Benedict), the man trapped inside, and smells a story.
Immediately he begins to sabotage the rescue efforts. When the engineer in charge of getting Mimosa out explains that it might take most of a day to get him out safely, Tatum conconcts a much more convulted rescue plan, one that will certainly take days. Days during which he can write a great story about this poor man trapped in a mountin. A story that will finally take him back to New York.
Along the way he meets the slightly corrupt sheriff (Ray Teal), who is more-than-willing to help him, figuring the attention boosts his chances of getting relected. Also present is Mimosa's wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling), who can't stand her husband and wants to leave. Tatum practically forces her to remain, saying the story works so much better if there's a grieving wife at home for him to focus on.
As the days roll past, people begin to show up. First just a family on their way to a nice vaction, who end up settling in for the long haul. Before you know it, the entire area is filled with cars, as people come from miles around to witness this great story. Eventually a large carnvial builds up around the site (in fact the movie was, at one point, called The Big Carnival). Access to the cave area, once free, goes from 25 cents a car to 50 cents, and then to a dollar. The gas station is making money hand over fist. Tatum is being courted by New York. Everyone is benefiting. Everyone but Leo.
Things begin to change in the life of everyone involved, including Tatum, when Leo starts to get sicker and sicker. Tatum quickly realizes the story doesn't work if the man in the cave doesn't make it out alive, and starts to try and change his tactics, only to find out that it might be too late.
The story is based to a great extent on real-life events in 1925, when a man named Floyd Collins became trapped in a mine. It also put me in mind of those stories back in the late 80's and early 90's, where it seemed like every week some kid was getting trapped in a well. If nothing else, this movie shows well that the media circus that errupted around those wells was little different from what has gone before.
When the movie was released, it was largely panned. Many people seemed to think it was overly-cynical and presented an image of America as it wasn't. The film also failed miserably at the box office. It did get an Oscar nomination, for the screenplay, but lost. Most people today have never even heard of the film, and that's a tragedy.
The movie was recently released on DVD by the Criterion Collection and turns up on Turner Classic Movies from time-to-time. It's an exceptional film, with stunning cinematography, great performances and a wonderful screenplay. It feels amazingly modern despite being 57 years old.
Roger Ebert said of this movie:
"Wilder, true to this vision and ahead of his time, made a movie in which the only good men are the victim and his doctor. Instead of blaming the journalist who masterminds a media circus, he is equally hard on sightseers who pay 25 cents admission. Nobody gets off the hook here."
He's exactly correct. The public that eats up these stories is every bit as culpable as the journalists who create them. If we ignore these stories, they'll go away. Instead the public lavishes attention onto them, encouraging the worst in journalism. On the plus side, at least in this case, it makes for a wonderful, if sometimes hard to watch, film.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Bad news sells best.
Comment: Ignored, unappreciated, even despised by the majority upon its initial release, Ace in the Hole is a bold social critique that pulls no punches. This movie holds up the public mirror and tries to make people see just how much they suck.
Kirk Douglas delivers another fearless performance as Charles Tatum, a shameless big-city reporter that has been exiled from several lucrative jobs. So he retreats to a small town newspaper gig in New Mexico, in order to reestablish his career.
Tatum hates his new job, and desperately searches for the big break that will propel him back into the limelight. That moment eventually comes when a mine collapses, trapping a worker inside. Tatum takes charge of all the relief efforts, not out of concern for the desperate man inside, but for the fame that accompanies this tragedy. A media frenzy ensues.
One moment that illustrates Tatum's arrogance--other reporters try to move in and capture some of the news coverage. One says "We're all in the same boat". Tatum's cynical response was "No, I'm in the boat. You're in the water."
This movie is an excellent display of humanity's overall decline of morality. How vanity supersedes compassion. How humanity has lost touch with one another. I'm not trying to sound judgemental, heck I'm ignoring all company policies and personal job responsibilities by writing this review. Nobody's perfect. But this is a great movie, with powerful but controlled acting and a significant message.
So now, go hug a stranger. No, on second thought you better not. You'll probably get punched.
Customer Rating:
Summary: True Movie Geeks Rejoice!
Comment: I bought this DVD for my boyfriend for a Christmas present with my fingers crossed. It's impossible to describe how movie-centric he is... we've chosen vacation destinations based on movies. It was a HUGE hit! He's watched all of the extras at least once now, and he loved the creative way Criterion made the front insert look like an old newspaper. It's gritty, ahead of it's time, and Kirk Douglas is a true star! Criterion wins again (as if anyone thought it'd be otherwise!).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Easily one of the best movies I saw this year.
Comment: Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951)
Thank heaven (or Criterion) for a release of Billy Wilder's notorious and brilliant Ace in the Hole for the home video market. As topical as it may have been fifty-six years ago, today it has an unprecedented relevance to American society. It's rare that a film's importance grows over time. This is one of those cases.
The story centers around Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas in the performance of his career), a disgraced newspaper reporter who finds himself working in the backwoods world of Albuquerque journalism, covering compelling news stories like a rattlesnake contest. While on his way to cover one such story with cub photographer Herbie Cook (Green Grass of Wyoming's Robert Arthur), he stumbles into something much bigger: Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), who owns a service station/knickknack shop in the dusty little town of Los Barios, has gotten himself trapped in a mine collapse while looking for Indian relics in a cliff dwelling to sell to tourists. Rather than simply helping the guy out, getting one story, and going on with his life, Tatum-- desperate to get back in the good graces of the Eastern papers with a strong series of stories-- concocts a plan with the corrupt local Sheriff (Ray Teal) to keep the story alive for a week. In the process, he manipulates everyone around him, including Leo's cynical yet naïve wife (Jan Sterling).
Wilder takes the idea of the media circus to new heights here (including having an actual circus on the grounds during the latter half of the film). Ace in the Hole is a relentlessly pessimistic film in which no one cares about Leo Minosa the human being, only about Leo Minosa the story and what each person can get out of it. Leo's wife wants a way out of hicksville, as does Tatum (and, to a lesser extent, Herbie); the sheriff wants re-elected; the head engineer of the rescue team wants an exclusive on the fat contracts that come with the sheriff's re-election; even the competing papers' journalists, who are the only people in the film kinda-sorta set up as the good guys, just want the story, and their editors eventually want Tatum. After a while, news stops being news and starts being entertainment. (Note that Wilder has no illusions about this from the get-go; the first story Tatum files has less to do with Leo Minosa than the Indian curse that Minosa believes trapped him in the shaft.) This, of course, is exactly what's been happening to American culture since not long after Watergate.
Topicality, though, is not the only reason to watch Ace in the Hole. Wilder was one of those great directors, now an endangered species, who could do anything (and often did); the melodramatic Ace in the Hole was bookended by Sunset Blvd., the finest piece of film noir of all time, and Stalag 17, the movie that (loosely) formed the basis of the television show Hogan's Heroes. Imagine a modern director filming three so widely differing movies in a row, not to mention having all three of the movies, fifty years later, being known as timeless classics of filmdom. Wilder got the most out of every actor he ever cast in a movie, and knew where to put the cameras and how to film the shots so that all that acting talent could be showcased in the finest possible way. A Billy Wilder movie is filmmaking at its best, and Ace in the Hole, finally available again after languishing in obscurity so long, is ample evidence of that. **** ½
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great film with a major flaw!
Comment: Ace In The Hole (aka The Big Carnival) was directed by my hero, Billy Wilder. He is the genius who gave us Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot - three of my all-time favorite films. Ace In The Hole, however, suffers from the over-the-top performance of Kirk Douglas who manages to play every scene with clenched teeth and boiling-point anger. His early scenes in the small newspaper office in Albuquerque are so over-played that he comes off like a man in need of a straight-jacket rather than a job. I believe it would be a more powerful film if his character were a little more sympatetic initially, thereby shocking us once his dark side is fully revealed. As it stands now, we are not surprised at the depth of his depravity because of Douglas' inability to bring some subtlety to his performance. Having said all that, there is much here to recommend...some solid acting performances and a powerful story of greed and power and how contagious corruption is. Jan Sterling stands out as the cold and indifferent wife of the man trapped in the cave. She delivers the only funny line in the movie, "I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." She can be seen in Caged and in her Oscar-nominated performance in The High And The Mighty. In closing, I would like to say that I think William Holden would have brought more subtley and dimension to the lead role. However, it is what it is and I my hope is that this review has peaked your curiosity and you will watch the film and decide for yourself.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
