Ace in the Hole (film group essay)

　


The journalist is a confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, bargaining for their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Janet Malcolm The Journalist and the Murderer


Billy Wilder has a brain full of razors.
William Holden

　

　

　

Billy Wilder was born Samuel Wilder in Austria in 1906. As a young man, he participated in writing a landmark film in German cinema, Menschen am Sonntag ("People on Sunday"), a picture that presages both neo-realism and the French New Wave – the German term for this kind of Weimar Republic Art was Neue-Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity"). Menschen am Sonntag feels improvised, a genuinely cheerful movie about a group of young people in Berlin and their adventures on a sunny afternoon in Berlin in 1929 – people meet for drinks, stroll in the park, pair-off and there are romantic interludes; it’s all weightless, inconsequential, poignant with youthful yearning and, surprisingly, one of the biggest hits in German films in 1930 when it was released. Menschen am Sonntag involved both Siodmak brothers, Fred Zinneman, and Edgar Ulmer, all Jewish artists who ended up with Wilder in Hollywood a decade or so later.

Alert to the political weather, Wilder left Germany for Paris in the early thirties, directed a film there, and, then, moved to Hollywood. (Wilder’s mother, grandmother, and stepfather all were murdered by the Nazis). He co-wrote Ninotchka (1939, directed Ernst Lubitsch) and established himself as one of the most sophisticated writers in the business, a remarkable achievement when it is considered that English was probably his fourth language after German, Yiddish, and French. (To some extent, Lubitsch is Wilder’s mentor, at least, with respect to his sex comedies – Wilder amplifies the famous "Lubitsch touch", a world-wise mildly risque approach to the war of the sexes perfected by the earlier film maker, also an urban, German-speaking Jew.) Wilder began directing films in the forties and, ultimately, made some of the most well-known and highly praised movies produced during the Studio era. Among his famous films are The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Blvd. (1950), Some like it Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960). For The Apartment, Wilder won Oscars for writing, production, and direction. His best known films are sophisticated comedies like Some Like it Hot and The Apartment as well as The Fortune Cookie and One, Two, Three... But Wilder dabbled in problem pictures like The Lost Weekend, a film about alcoholism, and made an early film noir, Double Indemnity (1944). He wrote anti-Nazi documentaries during the war years, directed war films, and made just about every kind of picture with the notable exception of a Western. (One might argue, although frivolously, I think, that Ace in the Hole is a kind of Western – at least, it features Indians and dramatic desert landscapes.)

After The Apartment, Wilder’s invention seems to have flagged and many of his later films were disappointments. He retired from film making in the late eighties to devote his attention to hobbies – he was an avid art collector and his home in the Santa Monica mountains was a kind of salon for artists. (There are a number of celebrated David Hockney paintings that show Wilder’s house and swimming pool.) He died at 95 in 2002. His gravestone says "He was a writer NOBODY’S PERFECT" – a reference to Joe E. Louis’ famous closing words in Some Like it Hot.

Wilder made Ace in the Hole (sometimes known as The Big Carnival) flush from the success of Sunset Blvd. This was Wilder’s first film made in several years in which his writing partner, Charles Brackett, did not participate in the script. Brackett is generally thought to have exercised a moderating influence on Wilder’s cynicism and exceptionally bitter view of human nature. Accordingly, Ace in the Hole is unremittingly savage and harsh to the point that the film’s first reviewers dismissed it as "grotesque." Some writers suggest that Wilder’s perspective on human folly is so cruel in this film that it offended audiences – there is no doubt that the picture, a very expensive film, bombed at the box office. (The movie cost about 1.4 million dollars – Wilder was paid $250,000 for the script.) Many critics argue that the movie is best understood as film noir. I question this genre assignment as well. However, on one level, this characterization is persuasive – some writers argue that film noir dramatizes the "crack-up of the American dream". Surely, there is no aspect of the American Dream that survives this film unscathed.

Ace in the Hole alludes elliptically to Sunset Blvd, Wilder’s previous film that had garnered three Oscars. In the beginning of Sunset Blvd, the unemployed Hollywood screenwriter played by William Holden must conceal his car from repossession agents. Under pursuit, he parks the car in the driveway of the spooky mansion where Norma Desmond, the silent film star played by Gloria Swanson, lives. This plot contrivance leads to the hero’s encounter with Desmond and triggers the events of the rest of the film. Ace in the Hole begins with the journalist’s car actually being towed – it is as if the repo-men have caught up with the screenwriter in Sunset Blvd and repossessed his car. Thus, incidents involving cars in trouble (either about to be repossessed or malfunctioning) initiate the action in both movies. Similarly, both films feature a hero who is a down-on-his-luck writer. There is a distinct element of cynicism about the writer’s trade, a suggestion that writers are a bit too willing to prostitute themselves. One might detect an element of self-loathing in Wilder’s screenplays consistent with the legend on his gravestone.

Kirk Douglas is central to the film and represents core narrative perspective from which the action is portrayed. As in Sunset Blvd, Ace in the Hole focuses on the hero’s point of view (a more incongruous strategy in Sunset Blvd since the first shot reveals that the narrator is dead). We see the world, more or less, through the eyes of Douglas’ character. In effect, we are asked to identify with a louse, a bad man. With limited exceptions, we only know what the protagonist knows – this is not perceived by the viewer as a restriction on our knowledge, however: what the hero knows is more than sufficient for us to make sense of the film and, in fact, the hero is like a screenwriter – he manipulates the story and pulls the strings on the marionettes. In the law, there is a concept used in estate planning – the notion of the "measuring life". In Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas is the "measuring life" – that is, the film spans the period of time from his grand entrance into Albuquerque in the towed car to the moment when he slams down, face-first, in the film’s last shot: the film begins and ends with him. Indeed, the ominous low angle at the end of the film signals Douglas centrality to the picture – the camera moves in an accommodating way to a position where it can best document his downfall; the camera’s placement, therefore, presages the hero’s demise and serves as a rhetorical device to emphasize how the mighty have fallen.

Godard remarked that every edit represents a moral choice and that it is not so important how a scene begins but decisively significant how it ends. In this regard, Wilder’s last shot has a moral significance particularly because the peculiar low angle immediately draws attention to the image in a way that is different from most of the unassuming and workmanlike images that comprise the rest of the film. The viewer asks him- (or her-)self, why is the camera stationed on the floor? How did they get it down there? What is the point of this arduous positioning? All such questions are answered by the hero’s collapse that brings his face down to the level of the lens. But is this way of answering these questions valid? Certainly, it is determinative in every respect – the actor’s fall closes the film like a door slamming in our face. In another respect, the last shot signifies the working of fate – no one had any real agency in this film: everyone will play out the hand dealt to them and destiny (here imaged as camera placement) will decide the outcome. But, it must be said, this level of control exercised by Wilder over his actor and their story is intensely writerly – the moving finger writes, and what has been written can not be altered, notwithstanding "all your piety and wit."

Wilder’s metier was the Kammerspiel – that is, a small ensemble film, exquisitely scripted that takes place in relatively limited circumstances. Wilder didn’t like shooting on location, preferring the control that exists in a studio production. Ace in the Hole is uncharacteristic for Wilder. With the exception of a few artfully concealed rear-projection shots and the studio footage of the cave where Leo Mimosa is trapped, Wilder shot this picture on location near Gallup, New Mexico. In Sunset Blvd, Wilder bows briefly in the direction of a legendary, but much lesser, director, Cecil B. DeMille. (DeMille has a famous cameo in which he prepares Gloria Swanson for her final shot.) DeMille made big screen epics and Wilder ventures into this territory with Ace in the Hole. The set near Gallup, New Mexico was 3000 feet long with a depth of 650 feet. An adjacent railroad brought extras to the location – Wilder’s budget authorized him to 550 extras, a huge number of people for a film of this kind. When word reached Gallup and the other nearby villages that Hollywood was making a film in the west New Mexico desert, other spectators arrived and were enlisted into appearing as extras – in some scenes shot on weekends, as many as 3000 people were on-hand and the carnival atmosphere depicted in the movie was real. Surprisingly, Wilder manages the spectacle very effectively – the scenes showing the carnival from atop the cliff and the climax when Douglas’ character, the corrupt Tatum, addresses the mob are brilliantly designed and filmed.

Wilder wanted to exploit the motif of the rattlesnake in the film’s opening – instead of the Paramount logo, he asked that the film begin with an image of a coiled rattlesnake striking at the camera. The footage was shot and tested, but found to be too intense – studio memos show that there was a concern that pregnant women in the audience would be so terrified that they would miscarry their children. Kirk Douglas fondly recalled the film as one of his best. Unlike many leading men, Douglas was unafraid to play scoundrels and he relished the part of Tatum. In the scene in which he strangles Mimosa’s treacherous wife, Douglas told the actress to signal to him if he was actually hurting her. When the camera was running, Douglas strangled her so realistically that she was unable to give him the signal and almost passed-out. Tatum’s death was a fait accompli – the production code required that a wicked character such as that played by Douglas receive his just deserts. In fact, the studio production code censors were highly critical that the film did not deliver come-uppance to the corrupt sheriff.

Film makers as diverse as Spike Lee and Guy Maddin have praised Ace in the Hole as an exceptional film. The movie lost money in the United States and was derided by critics as "unrealistic". In fact, it now thought that many of the journalists writing about the movie disliked the picture because, in fact, it was too authentic and cast too many uncomfortable aspersions on their profession. The film was very successful in Europe where it was a big box-office hit, shown there under the name The Big Carnival.

Midway through the film, there is an ecstatic shot that verges on the surrealistic. This is my favorite image from the film: we have just seen Leo Mimosa trapped in the cave. His eyes peer out of the darkness and he seems to pleading for help. The image, then, dissolves into an overhead shot of the carnival outside. One of Leo’s eyes remains visible, however, open and staring out of the ground on which the spectators walk.

　


Floyd Collins

Explorers in the remote recesses of Mammoth Cave, a system of underground passages and chambers now mapped to 650 kilometers, sometimes find rusty cans of Campbell’s Pork and Beans in parts of the cavern never known to have been entered. These artifacts mark the presence of Floyd Collins, the great spelunker, who died in February 1925. The old cans, sometimes accompanied by burnt-out matches, show that Collins reached these inaccessible places, rested there, and ate a meal underground before continuing his explorations.

Floyd Collins was 37 when the accident in Sand Cave killed him. He died searching for another entrance to the Mammoth Cave System closer to the main highway than the show-cave that his family owned, a hole in the hills called Crystal Cave. This grotto was the last cave on the road leading into the mountains and several miles beyond the known and historic entrances to Mammoth Cave. As a consequence, tourists motoring to Mammoth Cave had a chance to stop at Onyx Cave, Colossal Cave, Salt Cave, and Great Onyx Cave before reaching the National Park. Collins’ cave was down the road a few miles from the Park and, therefore, at the end of the route – practically speaking very few tourists ever got as far as Crystal Cave and, for that reason, Floyd went underground, exploring passages in the hopes that he would find another cavern worthy of being shown to tourists closer to Mammoth Cave. And, indeed, a mile or so off the main highway, near Onyx Cave, there was a musty opening into the ground known to locals as Sand Cave. No one had explored Sand Cave and so it was not known where it went. Collins negotiated a deal with the three farmers who owned the cave and its access from the highway – if he found a show cave at the bottom of the crooked sinkhole of Sand Cave, the four men would be partners in developing the property.

Collins entered Sand Cave on January 30, 1925. Under a rocky overhang, a cistern-like pit opened into the limestone. The pit had sheer walls, but they were close together – in the first 100 feet the narrow crack, zigzagged five times, at each bend tightening to an uncomfortable squeeze. The tightest part of the cave was a jagged pothole that corkscrewed down to where there was a dome-shaped room large enough for a man to stand upright. The walls of the spider-hole were rugged and brittle and passage downward caused muck and stones to shower down into the pit. Collins dropped down through the corkscrew into the dome-shaped room, found some more leads descending into the earth from that place, and, then, climbed upward. As he wiggled through the twisting hole, he dislodged rocks and an avalanche of lose gravel pummeled him. One of the stones falling from above smashed into Collins’ left leg and pinned it in the tight passage. As he groped for handholds above his head, Collins dragged down more sand and pebbles until the passageway was clogged with debris – thus, he was caught and held tight in the narrow hole, trapped 55 feet underground and 150 feet from the opening under the rock shelter.

Collins’ partners knew that he was exploring Sand Cave and the next day went to the rock shelter to look for him. They heard him crying out underground and began efforts to rescue him from the cave. From the outset, Sand Cave was a scary place – the little bushel-basket sized cavity under the rock overhang twisted back and forth, a vertical shaft that changed direction every ten feet. The pinchpoints were daunting and rubbed would-be rescuer’s backs and rib cages raw. People who entered the cave recalled that it smelled bad, like death and shit. One of Floyd’s brothers was daring enough to get to point where the spelunker was pinned – Collins’ head and arms and upper torso protruded from a blockage of gravel and rock fallen down into the hole. An electric light was strung down into the cave so that Collins would not be trapped in the dark and so that the bulb could provide him with a little warmth – it was cold in the bottom of Sand Cave.

For a couple days, local people tried to figure out a way to extricate Collins from the place where he was trapped. Nothing worked. Newspapermen came to cover the dramatic attempts to rescue the man pinned in the darkness. One of these journalists was a young man named Skeets (that is "Skeeter" or "Mosquito") Miller. Miller worked for a Louisville paper as a cub-reporter – the rescue in cave country was one of his first assignments.

Miller had the fearlessness of the young and foolish. And he was small – five foot five inches weighing only 117 pounds. He scrambled into the cave, following the electric light cable around the five tight turns to reach Collins. After comforting Collins and bringing him some coffee and food, Miller climbed up out of the cave and posted his first story with the newspaper. Miller’s stories caught the attention of the public and he was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the incident. Each time, Miller descended into the cave, his crawl down to Collins became headline news in itself – for more than a week, Miller reported twice daily on Collins’ spirits, health, and greetings that he sent to people on the surface from his underground tomb. Very few other journalists had the courage (or physical ability) to reach Collins and, so, the story was largely told through Miller’s reports. (Many people claimed that they had ventured down to see Collins but most of those stories were fictitious – about thirty or so feet from the opening, there was a wider place in the fissure called the "turn-around room" – almost all of the journalists other than Skeets Miller reached that place, became fearful and claustrophobic, and, then, abandoned their effort reach the trapped man, often leaving the bottles of water or coffee or tins of food that they were carrying to Collins in the "turn-around room." Most of those people said that had reached Collins, reassured him that help was on the way, and left him provisioned – but, in fact, these accounts were untrue: the majority of the journalists on the scene stopped in the "turnaround room" deposited their booty there and, then, ascended to the surface, not coming within a hundred feet of the dark, tiny hole where Collins was pinned. In the 1970's when the National Park Service let archaeologists into the long-sealed Sand Cave, a treasure trove of intact bottles and cans of food was found abandoned in the "turnaround" room.)



In a video interview shot in 1983, Kirk Douglas smears "Skeets" Miller. Douglas says that the scenario for Ace in the Hole was based on a "real story" and that a corrupt journalist contrived to keep Collins underground until he died. This is both untrue and unfair. Sand Cave was a very nasty place – seasoned war reporters were afraid to go down into the deadly hole. Miller was brave enough to get the story and sufficiently loyal to Collins that he continued to provide him with supplies and company even when it was thought that the whole cave system was in danger of collapse. Miller did nothing to delay Collins’ rescue – there was no easy approach to extracting the spelunker from the cave, although, as noted below, another tiny crawl-space, if it had been explored, might have provided an alternative way to reach the trapped man.

After about a week of unavailing efforts to rescue Collins, the access tunnel down to the pit where the spelunker was slowly dying collapsed. It was determined that the crumbling walls of the passageway were too fragile and no one was allowed to descend into the spider-hole from the surface. The Governor of Kentucky ordered that a lateral tunnel be cut into the rock face slanting down to intersect the vertical shaft where Collins was trapped. Mining engineers and mining crews were deployed to chisel through the stone to reach Collins.

By this time, the fields and roads around the entry to Sand Cave had developed a carnival aspect. Food stands were set up to serve meals and snacks to the tourists flocking to the site and several trains departed from Louisville daily on the L&N Line to bring gawkers to the meadows around the cave. The narrow winding roads leading from the State Highway to Mammoth Cave were blocked by enormous traffic jams. There was wide-spread confusion about the situation in the cave. Photographs simulating Collins’ dilemma showed a man sprawled on the ground in an open cavern among stalactites and stalagmites with a car-sized rock on his leg – the rock pinning Collins to the cave floor was said to weigh 10 or 15 or even 20 tons. In fact, Collins was pinned in an oval hole two-feet in diameter at the bottom of zigzagging shaft – the rock entrapping his leg was the size of a leg of lamb and weighed about 16 pounds.

The lateral tunnel reached Collins on February 17, 1925. Collins was dead and it was estimated that he had perished from hypothermia and general despair about three days before the mining tunnel intersected the shaft a few feet above his head. Efforts to remove the corpse were unsuccessful. It was an eerie place. People said that they heard the sound of old gospel tunes coming from the pit where Collins was buried.

People wrote popular fiddle and blue-grass songs about the death of Floyd Collins and efforts to rescue the trapped man were reported in newspapers around the world. Until the O. J. Simpson murder case, the death of Floyd Collins was ranked as the third most important newspaper story ever reported – first place remains the story of Lucky Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight; the second most important story also involved Lindbergh – the story of the abduction and death of the Lindbergh baby. (Lindbergh himself took aerial photographs of the brouhaha near the entrance to Sand Cave and the huge traffic jams on the country lanes.)

In the early Spring of 1926, Collins’ mother and brothers hired another crew of miners to penetrate the shaft where the dead body was located and, after much effort, the corpse was recovered. A contemporary photograph shows the stark white cadaver, eyes still open lying on a mortuary slab. Collins was embalmed and put in a metal vault. Inside the vault, his corpse was displayed in a coffin with a glass lid. The vault was set next to the entrance of Crystal Cave as a tourist attraction under the sign: Floyd Collins -- World’s Greatest Cave Explorer.

The Collins family lost Crystal Cave by foreclosure in 1927. The new operators moved the vault into the cave itself and, for a small bribe, tour guides were willing to open the tomb and show visitors Collins’ face under the glass lid of his casket. This practice continued until 1989 when the National Park Service acquired Crystal Cave and shut it down. In that year, Collins’ body was buried in the Mammoth Cave Baptist cemetery. (The family was fearful of a reprise of 1929 when vandals broke into Crystal Cave and dragged the corpse out of its casket. The body was found several miles away in a burlap sack on the bank of a river. The thieves had stolen had ripped off Collins’ badly crushed left leg, the limb pinned in the cave by the 16 pound rock and, apparently, kept that as a sourvenir – no doubt there is some curio store or dusty Wunderkammer in some remote hamlet where that twisted, mummified limb can be seen to this day.)

Spelunkers ultimately established that the Flint Ridge Cave System, where Crystal Cave is located, is connected to the Mammoth Cave complex and that, indeed, all of the caverns in the ridge can be characterized as part of Mammoth Cave. Panic makes people unobservant. When the National Park allowed archaeologists to enter Sand Cave in the 1970's, another side passage was discovered, just big enough for a small man or woman to navigate – this passage led to another opening into the tight corkscrew shaft where Collins was pinned. If this passage had been explored, it’s argued that Collins could have been rescued.

Collins’ ghost haunts Mammoth Cave. On several occasions, he has guided lost spelunkers to the surface or helped them find their way through the maze of passageways. In one case, a woman slipped from a rope and harness that she was using to rappel down a shaft. Fortunately, her caving partner was beside her, caught a hold of the rope, and, then, secured it to the wall so that the woman did not fall. Surprisingly, the spelunker found that her partner was not below her at all, but a dozen feet overhead in the same shaft. Someone saved her, but it wasn’t the other cave explorer.

Floyd Collins’ story is irresistably dramatic. It affords the basic premise for Ace in the Hole – an Austrian Jew, then, employed as a part-time actor and taxi-dancer was enthralled, like the rest of the world, by the news reports from far-off Kentucky. This man was Billie Wilder and 25 years later he wrote and directed a movie about this story. In 1996, Adam Guettel composed the musical Floyd Collins – the show is said to be one of the very successful American musicals premiered post-Sondheim and is universally praised. (Guettel is the grandson of the Broadway composer Richard Rodgers.) Around 2009, Billy Bob Thornton bought screen rights to several of the books about Floyd Collins’ death. But a successful script couldn’t be written – the story is too black and disturbing to be entertaining. This probably explains the fact that Guettel’s folk opera on the subject also is only rarely revived. Wilder’s wonderfully accomplished and witty Ace in the Hole, starring Kirk Douglas, lost money at the box-office and was panned by the critics.