Kirk Douglas: It doesn’t matter if you’re a nice guy or you’re a bastard

The quiet newsroom of the Sun-Bulletin in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is just a temporary holding pen for Chuck Tatum, the restless and unprincipled reporter played by Kirk Douglas in the 1951 Hollywood classic, Ace in the Hole. Sacked from bigger newspapers for being unreliable, drinking on the job and much worse, Tatum persuades the paper’s worthy editor, who works under an embroidered sampler bearing the words “Tell the Truth”, to give him a job despite his better judgment. “I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog,” Tatum promises.

This is the set-up for the best film made yet about the ethics of the press. And, although the death of Douglas elicited deserved praise for his other famous roles, in Spartacus, Paths of Glory and Lust for Life, it is this film that really gave the actor’s merciless screen presence full rein. Douglas himself recognised the strength he brought to the screen, whether cast as a hero or an antihero: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a nice guy or you’re a bastard. What matters is, you won’t bend!” he told Esquire magazine in 1969.

Ace in the Hole, directed by the masterful Billy Wilder, creator of Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity, swiftly becomes a blistering portrayal of the dynamics of what we now call “a media circus”. Inspired by the real-life press feeding frenzy that sprang up in 1925 when a man called Floyd Collins was trapped in a Kentucky cave, the plot has Tatum taking control of the scene of a mining disaster and working it to his own ends. Quickly establishing himself inside the filling station run by a trapped man’s wife, the newshound twists the facts to suit his tale and shows no visible pangs of guilt. “I’ve met a lotta hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you, you’re 20 minutes,” the wife tells Tatum in grudging awe.

As the late critic Roger Ebert noted when Wilder’s film was released on video in 2007, “there is not a wasted shot”. But really it is the performance that Douglas gives that powers the action. His Tatum is a horribly convincing portrayal of an unsympathetic, tortured soul. The star “is at his most uningratiatingly forceful in virtually every scene”, judged Philip French in an appreciation of the film he wrote for the Observer in 2014. He makes you believe you are watching a human being capable of anything.

The title of Wilder’s film is taken from stud poker and refers to Tatum’s search for the competitive edge in the ruthless game of selling news to the public. But the screenplay, co-written by the director with Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels, proved too gritty for general consumption, and the film failed on its first release during the height of McCarthyism in America. The movie studio tried again later, renaming it The Big Carnival, but still it upset audience assumptions about what a good film should offer.

The press were not happy either. After all, what Douglas’s reporter does is worse than even the lurid nightmares of a misused litigant in the British phone-hacking scandal. When Tatum discovers that the trapped man could be freed from the mineshaft in just two days, he finds an elaborate way to lengthen the process and so provide a better national spectacle.

His behaviour is beyond the pale for even a hardened Fleet Street hack, although his efforts to persuade the man’s disaffected wife to pretend to be loyal are closer to the mark. In disreputable newsrooms, stories are still adjusted to fit the template of readers’ expectations.

Wilder knew the newspaper business. He had worked on a series of popular titles in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. The only concession he made to the honour of his old trade is that Ace in the Hole is almost as hard on the public appetite for sensation and drama as it is on the workings of the press. The film is shot in black and white but its real triumph is its shades of grey. There is humanity and morality in the story, but not quite enough.

To watch Douglas here is to be reminded that just because a film was made 70 years ago it doesn’t mean it was made in simpler times. And, on Oscar weekend, it is worth remembering that those films that endure are not always the ones to win early plaudits. The classics that go on to earn a place in people’s hearts, or ultimately to be acclaimed by critics, often fall by the wayside in the initial awards goldrush.
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