Enlisting the help of Leo’s peroxide blonde wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling), Chuck writes up Leo’s plight in the newspaper in such a way that the entire US takes an interest. In a way reminiscent of Bridget’s attitude towards “cow country” in The Last Seduction (1994), Chuck endlessly disdains the empty provincialism of Albuquerque, but one day he stumbles across a man, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) trapped inside of an Indian burial ground of a mountain. Adapting the story of the media circus created around Floyd Collins, a man who got stuck in a cave in Kentucky in 1925, Billy Wilder trains his satire directly at the audience, the popcorn-crunching crowd eager for amusement, so naturally the film was a bomb (but not in Europe, of course).Ģ) Ace in the Hole concerns a down-on-his-luck big city journalist, Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) who reluctantly takes a job as a reporter for the Albuquerque Sun Bulletin in New Mexico so that he can find one big story to connive his way back to New York. Ace in the Hole is rare in that one never seems to get to the bottom of its cheerful cynicism, the ferocity of its unfunny Mad magazine ridicule of American emptiness, arrogance, cultural imperialism, and gullibility. I’ve been watching it with semi-obsessive interest ever since, and I’ve heard that it is one of the favorites of Sam Peckinpah, Spike Lee, and Woody Allen.
1) When I first watched Ace in the Hole last year, I was stunned.
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