Unrated, 1 hr. 51 min. Directed By:
Billy Wilder. Release Date:
Oct 19, 1951. DVD Release
Date: Jul 17, 2007.
This is one of a relatively few suggestions
that appeared multiple times on recommendations from my readers. Even fewer of the films suggested were like
this one, where not only did it appear multiple times, but I’d never even heard
whisper of this movie. I knew nothing
about it, and it wasn’t until I hit the play button on my PS3 controller that I
learned Kirk Douglas was in this movie, too.
Perhaps, because of my age, I don’t
have much of an opinion of Kirk Douglas.
Until April, I’d only seen him in one movies. I think it was called Tough Guys, and he played a con who’d spent most of his life in
jail and was being released into 1980s society.
I thought then that the character played by Douglas was kind of a tool,
and at some point, someone told me most of Douglas’ characters were like that.
Basically, I’d written him off. Even back when I wrote about Spartacus earlier this month, I hadn’t
been expecting a whole lot. But, with Ace in the Hole, I’m realizing that it
takes a lot to play a character that people are going to hate because they’re
supposed to hate him. In fact, we’re
supposed to LOVE to hate him, and this story makes it more than a little easy. It takes a lot of talent to play a character
like this, who would be so perfectly at home in the modern day that it’s almost
startling. I realized a little belatedly
that I’ve been dodging Douglas movies for the better part of 30 years because
of the parts he played, and those parts took more effort than I would ever have
given him credit for, so I’ll be less likely to take a pass on him in the
future, and I suspect I do the same thing to Clint Eastwood, so I need to take
stock.
One of my complaints about the
classics as a group is how few of them actually hold up well over the
decades. It’s sometimes hard to feel
like the movies are realistic in situations that just wouldn’t occur in modern
day. Ace
in the Hole doesn’t have that problem.
Douchebaggery, like hope, springs eternal in the human breast. You could find another Charles Tatum
(Douglas) probably within half a mile of your front door. You might actually find more than one. In that particular way, this movie was
decades ahead of its time. Most of the
characters we see here fit in better today than they would have in the
50s. What’s clear is that Billy Wilder,
the director and one of the screenwriters of this movie, had a REAL good line
on what people are really like. He and
Sartre had that in common.
This isn’t really a great
movie. It has a lot of flaws that seem
to center around the lulls in action.
There are a lot of characters and dialogue that seems to exist merely to
fill in the gaps between the juicier scenes, and that’s not a great filmmaking
or storytelling. But it’s enjoyable, and
I’m really, really amazed by how easily I could see this being a modern
film.
