The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 11-17
Ace in the Hole (1951)
Directed by Billy Wilder
If, in many of his other films, Wilder offset his sardonicism with a sentimentality that allowed for happy endings, no such escape valve exists in Ace in the Hole. The Austrian émigré’s satire of media sensationalism/poison-pen letter to America remains as breathtakingly uncompromising in its cynicism as ever. Sans a handful of minor voice-of-reason characters, everyone in this cast is characterized as varying shades of corrupt and corruptible. Not even Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), the man trapped under those fateful rocks in that New Mexico cave, is spared Wilder’s bile: When scheming journalist Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) reveals his professional bona-fides to him upon their first meeting, Leo already can’t help but try to manage his image, pleading with Tatum not to make him appear too silly. Then there are the gawking masses, most of whom see Minosa’s fate as nothing more than a tourist attraction—an attitude that Minosa’s uncaring wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling), shamelessly caters to as Tatum’s masterfully orchestrated media circus gets bigger. And yet, a perverse fascination underpins Wilder’s gaze. Chuck Tatum may be a callous sociopath, but there’s a striving energy to him—something Douglas brings out so vividly in his high-wire performance—that compels as much as it repels. After all, he’s as much looking for his own version of the American Dream as we all are, essentially. Kenji Fujishima (May 13-15, 11am at IFC Center; May 21, 5:30pm at Metrograph as part of “Spike Lee’s Dream Double Feature: Election Year Edition,” introduced by Lee)