ACE IN THE HOLE

Last night I had the privelege of seeing Billy Wilder's rarely screened ACE IN THE HOLE.
Ace , considered one of Wilder's most cynical films, follows unethical journalist Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), who's been driven out of every large city thanks to his unreliable reporting and constant boozing. Exiled to a small-town paper in New Mexico, Tatum happens upon a schlub trapped in a cave in an even smaller New Mexico town. Tatum enlists the help of a corrupt sheriff to drag out the rescue operation just long enough to create a media circus and secure a sweet staff job for himself on a big-league rag back in old New York.

Today, a film like ACE would too closely resemble a "ripped from the headlines" episode of Law and Order to be taken seriously as cinema. But thanks to the visionary bitterness of Wilder, it watches like a 55-year-old cautionary tale.

On another note, I love noticing film-geeky stuff in movies. In this one, a tourist boasting about his status as the first person to visit the site of the cave-in says that he works for the Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company. That was the name of the company that Fred MacMurray worked for, and that played such a prominent part in the movie Double Indemnity, a B. Wilder flick made 7 years earlier.