Belt and braces

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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28 September

A long way back to before the Festival's opening film, but here goes:

* Contains spoilers *

Billy Wilder co-wrote the film, so it seemed well deserved to think of reviving Ace in the Hole, not just as part of a theme of journalism in film, but to see why the film might have lacked popularity. As to the pairing with the short (not so short) Wakefield Express about a newspaper of that name (and its production and that of four sister papers), I am less sure, and think that I would have preferred to go, without an introduction, straight to Kirk Douglas, as Chuck Tatum, talking his way into a job in Albuquerque.

(If the short had been screened second, there would have been a risk that that some might - I would have chosen to leave after the feature (but so be it), and, although I accept that accompanying films were part of the fabric of how films were shown even in my childhood, that is not a usual way with revivals.)

Chuck has been there a year when we see him next, and I failed to notice that now he has ‘gone native’ by adopting the local habit of wearing braces on his trousers, but also a belt. Everybody knows him, everybody knows his rants about the stultifying nature of small-town news. (Garrison Keillor may have seen this film: his narrator in Love Me reminds me of it, now that I – have a chance to – reflect.)

Rattle-snakes aren’t Chuck’s thing, unlike the sheriff where he ends up, but he is dispatched to a gathering in their honour: he does not get to the destination, but we have a flavour of it through the Sheriff Kretzer’s specimen (and its tastes in food), because he sees the meat in a news story of Leo Minosa, a man trapped underground, trapped because (since Leo interprets being imprisoned as punishment) he went there to plunder a native American burial-ground yet another time.

Leo trusts the journalist who pushed past authority to get to him, and believes that he is trying to get him out quickly, rather than realizing that Chuck is spinning out the story as part of a plan to get back into a job in New York (or Chicago). The plan works, but the curse is that the delay has brought about Leo’s inevitable death – by then, Chuck, sure of himself, has already taken off his braces, thereby transporting us to the proprietor’s office and his mockery of such means of playing it safe.

So, as the imagery has told us, Chuck has started playing without a safety-net, and, when he could seek assistance for himself, he delays – again, the theme of putting something off – too long, because he feels obligated to see that Leo is given the final rites. Still not tending to his needs, and, after both dismissing the crowd that has gathered in the preceding days and having failed to interest his New York boss in the story of his betrayal, Chuck goes back to Albuquerque with that story.

He had played the newspaper bosses off against each other to get what he wanted, but his self-destructive self stakes everything on a closing story behind the final one: having seemed unable to announce Leo’s death to the world as ‘a scoop’, he has declaimed the matter in public and told everyone to go, a scene perhaps reminiscent of Christ clearing the Temple (but, here, the idolatrous temple of his own making, and one that contains a body to prove it).

Not for the most pure of motives, he has resisted the advances of Leo’s wife Lorraine (with the suitable bewitchment of Jan Sterling), who really just wants something better than Leo, his family, and the run-down desert café that they run. She only did not leave earlier (as she does afterwards) because she, too, believes in Chuck’s persuasive rhetoric, but she does not want to have to play the grieving wife to help the rescue story. Misjudging it, Chuck pushes it too far, too far beyond what is safe, by trying to force Lorraine back into her role, because it is his role, not hers.

In the final analysis, he staked too highly. In spotting and creating a dramatic story, in exploiting (as he says in relation to the sheriff’s snake festival and the card-game there that Chuck forced him to miss), he thought that he had, in Leo, an ace in the hole, not a pair of deuces.

With whom (or what), then, has Chuck been playing poker that his seemingly winning hand has collapsed, and been shown for what it is? Is he really a tragic hero, and is that what made Ace in the Hole, for all that it is well written, something that also did not make the film itself a winner with an audience that does not seek that sort of ending?


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