How Ace in the Hole foreshadowed the post-truth… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

How Ace in the Hole fore­shad­owed the post-truth era

12 Jun 2021

Words by Thomas Hobbs

Two men in a car holding a 'PRESS' sign, black and white image.
Two men in a car holding a 'PRESS' sign, black and white image.
Bil­ly Wilder’s 1951 noir has obvi­ous par­al­lels with our cur­rent age of fake news and alter­na­tive facts.

The expe­ri­ence of mak­ing Ace in the Hole clear­ly left a bad taste in Bil­ly Wilder’s mouth. Mauled by con­tem­po­rary crit­ics (“It’s a dis­tor­tion of jour­nal­is­tic prac­tice,” not­ed Bosley Crowther in The New York Times), mis­un­der­stood by a stu­dio hell­bent on chang­ing its title, and an obvi­ous box office fail­ure hav­ing failed to recoup its bud­get, the film wasn’t greet­ed with any­thing close to the rev­er­ence of 1950’s Sun­set Blvd. Fuck them All… Ace in the Hole is the best pic­ture I ever made,” Wilder lat­er remarked.

Yet, 70 years on, the film’s cau­tion­ary tale of an oppor­tunis­tic local reporter (a career-best Kirk Dou­glas as the tru­ly vil­lain­ous, woman-stran­gling jour­nal­ist” Chuck Tatem) prob­lem­at­i­cal­ly steer­ing the news agen­da after a local man becomes dan­ger­ous­ly trapped inside a col­lapsed cave feels less like a cri­tique of the jour­nal­is­tic prac­tices of its day and more like a warn­ing of how the dis­ci­pline might be bent out of shape in the years that followed.

Wilder, who ini­tial­ly worked as a reporter in Aus­tria before flee­ing after Hitler took pow­er, was acute­ly aware of the dan­gers jour­nal­ism was fac­ing, and com­ments he made to Ger­man biog­ra­ph­er Hell­muth Karasek seemed to sug­gest that Tatem was a reflec­tion of the director’s own worst impuls­es. As a jour­nal­ist, I was brash, burst­ing with assertive­ness, had a tal­ent for exag­ger­a­tion,” Wilder explained. I was con­vinced that in the short­est span of time I’d learn to ask shame­less ques­tions with­out restraint.”

It’s clear that Tatem, por­trayed by Dou­glas as the kind of arro­gant snake oil sales­man that Amer­i­can soci­ety so often falls for, is intend­ed to put a flame to jour­nal­is­tic tra­di­tion, cheek­i­ly light­ing his cig­a­rette match on a type­writer. If there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog,” he blunt­ly boasts to his edi­tor at the Albu­querque Sun-Bul­letin, while an embroi­dered Tell The Truth” art piece on the news­room’ wall vis­i­bly dis­gusts him.

Two men in distressed clothing lying on the ground, one reading a newspaper featuring a woman's portrait.

Tatem, who tricks his way into the cave in order to voyeuris­ti­cal­ly observe and get sound­bites from the trapped Leo Minosa (Richard Bene­dict), is told by the grave­ly injured man that he was sim­ply on the hunt for Indi­an arte­facts. How­ev­er, the exploita­tive reporter turns this into an atten­tion-grab­bing head­line that reads: Ancient curse entombs local man”. He’s very much of the mind­set that reporters shouldn’t let the truth get in the way of a good sto­ry, and the way he embell­ish­es this inci­dent has obvi­ous par­al­lels with our cur­rent era of fake news and alter­na­tive facts.

Tatem is more inter­est­ed in insert­ing him­self into the sto­ry than report­ing on it objec­tive­ly, a theme that feels espe­cial­ly pre­scient. He con­sis­tent­ly tells col­leagues of the impor­tance of human inter­est” sto­ries and the pub­lic need­ing an indi­vid­ual they can latch on to to make sense of a major event. His col­leagues wrong­ly assume this indi­vid­ual to be the unfor­tu­nate Leo, but Tatem is in fact refer­ring to him­self, and sub­se­quent­ly manoeu­vres in a way where fur­ther­ing his per­son­al brand super­sedes any fac­tu­al reporting.

Anoth­er review by The Hol­ly­wood Reporter com­plained that Ace in the Hole was a dis­tort­ed study of cor­rup­tion and mob psy­chol­o­gy that is noth­ing more than a brazen, uncalled-for slap in the face of two respect­ed and fre­quent­ly effec­tive Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions – demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ment and the free press.” Yet hear­ing Dou­glas end­less­ly talk about cre­at­ing a Tatem Spe­cial”, while also cyn­i­cal­ly using a stranger’s mis­for­tune to boost his own career, feels a lot less shock­ing today.

Tatem might have seemed like an anom­aly to crit­ics in 1951, but in 2021 his val­ue sys­tem is every­where that you look. Wilder seemed to know that his tal­ent for exag­ger­a­tion” would only become more and more preva­lent with­in jour­nal­ism in the years that fol­lowed, with the direc­tor cor­rect­ly envi­sion­ing a future where jour­nal­ists were less inter­est­ed in report­ing sto­ries and more pre­oc­cu­pied with becom­ing the sto­ry itself.

You might like