"There isn't any denying that there are vicious newspaper men and that one might conceivably take advantage of a disaster for his own private gain. But to reckon that one could so tie up and maneuver a story of any size, while other reporters chew their fingers, is simply incredible."
— Bosley Crowther, review of Ace in the Hole, for The New York Times
"It suddenly hit me. That's what people want to see. That's what I'll give them, blood and gore."
— Generoso Pope, Jr., owner of The National Enquirer
Did I ever mention I have a journalism degree? I wanted to work in the newspapers. It was the late 2000s and I was the biggest chump on Earth, but I was a big believer in the power of news to change the world. These days the mainstream news media in America is compromised: most newspapers are owned by billion-dollar corporations, the TV networks are increasingly de facto state controlled, and most people seem to get their news through Tiktok, which is full of right-wing influencers. Ten years ago we were all so mad about clickbait and "fake news" that we just gave the worst people in the world power over our information. Journalism as a profession seems to be cooked. And the sad truth of it is, it's kind of always been that way. Billy Wilder's lesser-known classic Ace in the Hole, while fictional, proposes a scenario that feels all too real: a sleepy small-town newspaper suddenly becomes host to one of the nastiest yellow journalists in the industry. It explodes in readership for its exclusive coverage of a tragedy, but at what cost?
Our journalist, one Chuck Tatum, is a classic Kirk Douglas character: brash, aggressive, bold, a man of action, but a bit short on moral fiber. Ultimately, not too different from Douglas himself. Tatum has been fired from 11 major metropolitan newspapers and is looking to make another big byline. Desperate for work, he takes a job at the Sun-Bulletin of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a town he is immediately contemptuous of ("even for Albuquerque, this is pretty Albuquerque!") After spending a year chasing down garden stories and covering the occasional hicktown event, he stumbles upon what he suspects might be his big break: a guy trapped in a cave, about three hours out of town. He soon turns it into a metaphorical (and eventually literal) media circus, with hundreds of people showing up to witness the rescue efforts, followed by carnival rides and food kiosks and a tent full of newspaper men desperate to get a scoop that Tatum, with the backing of a corrupt local sheriff, continually dangles over them.
While based on, and directly referencing, a real-life tragic incident in 1925, where a man named Floyd Collins became trapped at Sand Cave in Kentucky, triggering a media sensation with a similar carnival atmosphere, Ace in the Hole is far more cynical in its treatment of a news media chasing after tragedy by any means necessary. Initially the rescue plan involved shoring up the cave walls so they can extract Leo, the guy trapped in the cave in a day or two. But Tatum, with some threats from the sheriff, talks the contractor leading the rescue effort into digging through from atop the hill, which would extend the rescue time to six or seven days — all so Tatum can milk the situation for all its worth.
Wilder apparently had some things to say about the state of journalism at the beginning of the 1950s, a time of economic prosperity, but also a time of great societal alienation in a cynical, repressive post-war America. Yellow journalism was not new in 1951; as long as journalism has been a codified profession, there have been those who used it for their own ends. But the 1950s saw media access reach never-before-seen heights with the rise of television, and with it, a vicious, competitive media landscape. It's only gotten worse since: the rise of cable news in the 1970s and 80s, the death of the Fairness Doctrine, and the explosion in right-wing propaganda masquerading as legitimate news only anticipated the capture of once-staid institutions and a daily fire hose of disinformation across social media. It's as if the whole world has been taken over by Chuck Tatums.
There's a blackly satirical element to the film, with the ongoing gag of the ticket price to see the ancient cave dwellings gradually climbing from free to a dollar as the media circus around it swells like a hungry tick, or the sheriff having painting a campaign slogan on the side of the ancient stone mountain. It's not even clear if there are any genuinely decent characters in the film: Herbie the photographer goes from an idealistic young kid to a cynical clone of Tatum; Leo's wife Lorraine would have left this dusty hick town already if she wasn't making bank off the media circus; and even Leo is morally suspect, as the only reason he was caught in the cave-in in the first place was because he was looting the ancient cliff dwellings for artifacts to sell. It's as cynical about human nature and society as it gets, a worldview so bleak that even the corrupt cop mostly skated by censors (the Hays Code famously was pro-police) for being no more morally compromised than anyone else.
It's telling how little has changed in the decades since. A Face in the Crowd (1957) seemed to anticipate right-wing media with a folksy, down-home charmer turning out to be an abusive, adulterous demagogue with nothing but utter contempt for the millions of people nationwide who uncritically swallowed down his reactionary drivel. Network (1976) skewers the unscrupulousness of the television news landscape, exploiting one of their reporters having a breakdown on camera to boost sagging ratings. And Nightcrawler (2014), a movie about the news gathering industry, sums up the whole news business pretty succinctly: "Think of our news cast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut."
Now there's a headline for you.