If His Girl Friday is the quintessential screwball satire of the media, one that gives you permission to laugh with as much as at it, Ace in the Hole couldn't be more its polar opposite, a fierce, borderline hateful parable that rubs your face in its lurid sensationalism and dares you to be amused.
Chuck Tatum's quest for the fame he's long deserved plays right into Kirk Douglas's wheelhouse of compelling jerks (not unlike son Michael, really), his magnetic charisma driving the film almost single-handedly even as he abruptly slaps a woman to make her cry because tears suit his manufactured narrative, or browbeats a contractor into taking longer to save a man trapped in a mine, every extra day ensuring another front page headline.
He's a Trump figure with something like genuine cunning, and worst of all his audience is just as gullible, just as willing to eat up his lies so long as they're allowed a spot on the train to glory. Story matters little when spectacle looms so large, and Tatum lives for the spectacle of so-called "human interest."
The toxic power of the written word has rarely been as potent as when wielded by Billy Wilder, who cuts right to the bone and would take the whole limb if he could. His work is legendary because he fearlessly dove into any genre, took whatever material he was given and calibrated it for maximum punch, striking the funny bone just as often as the heart. Unjustly dismissed when it was first released, this has undergone a much deserved reevaluation in the years since and, perhaps most distressing, has turned out to be not only prescient but continually relevant.
As long as the Chuck Tatums of the world exist, so too will the seemingly fluid and even abstract nature of the truth, and all the ways it can be bent - or broken.
Chuck Tatum's quest for the fame he's long deserved plays right into Kirk Douglas's wheelhouse of compelling jerks (not unlike son Michael, really), his magnetic charisma driving the film almost single-handedly even as he abruptly slaps a woman to make her cry because tears suit his manufactured narrative, or browbeats a contractor into taking longer to save a man trapped in a mine, every extra day ensuring another front page headline.
He's a Trump figure with something like genuine cunning, and worst of all his audience is just as gullible, just as willing to eat up his lies so long as they're allowed a spot on the train to glory. Story matters little when spectacle looms so large, and Tatum lives for the spectacle of so-called "human interest."
The toxic power of the written word has rarely been as potent as when wielded by Billy Wilder, who cuts right to the bone and would take the whole limb if he could. His work is legendary because he fearlessly dove into any genre, took whatever material he was given and calibrated it for maximum punch, striking the funny bone just as often as the heart. Unjustly dismissed when it was first released, this has undergone a much deserved reevaluation in the years since and, perhaps most distressing, has turned out to be not only prescient but continually relevant.
As long as the Chuck Tatums of the world exist, so too will the seemingly fluid and even abstract nature of the truth, and all the ways it can be bent - or broken.