In what may be the most concise bit of foreshadowing in the long history of storytelling, Kirk Douglas speaks the following opening line in Billy Wilder's Ace In The Hole...
CHARLIE TATUM
(to tow truck driver)
Wait here.
If you know what happens next, I don't need to spell out the punchline. But for those of you who never managed to track down this previously hard-to-find treasure, I'll spare you the gory details (scroll to the bottom of the linked page) and leave you to discover for yourself that you will never be nearly so clever if you live three times longer than Mr. Wilder's ninety-six years. This long-lost nitrate nugget stands as one of his greatest achievements, right up there with stepping aside and allowing hubris (and Warren Beatty) to give Pauline Kael the inevitable dressing down she so richly deserved.
The fact is, Billy Wilder will be remembered long after every copy of Pauline Kael's short-sighted review of Ace In The Hole has been recycled as paper plates, and here's why: The broad's considerable flare for writing notwithstanding, her fatal weakness as a critic was a comprehensive lack of vision and a stubborn resistance to the notion that anyone other than her goes to movies.
Her tongue was as sharp as Dorothy Parker's, yet somehow girthier and mad butch. I'll be honest, it's impossible to put down one of her voluminous indulgences until you've blasted through at least half of it in a single sitting. If only her mama had hipped her to the fact that the cinema doesn't exist just for her, or her generation, or right now or next Thursday afternoon. It exists for all time and for all the humanity contained therein, and the greatest of film artists intuitively understand this. Most film critics, on the other hand, can see no farther than next Memorial Day. Herr Kael was no exception.
Billy Wilder produced and directed this box-office failure right after SUNSET BLVD. and just before STALAG 17. Some people have tried to claim some sort of satirical brilliance for it, but it's really just nasty, in a sociologically pushy way.
Let's face it, menopause can be rough. Still, Billy Wilder was hardly responsible for the cobwebs on her ovaries, so who's being nasty here? Sociologically pushy? This from a woman who gave a glowing review to Altman's Nashville months before it was even finished? She'd accused Wilder on more than one occasion of being overly cynical and mean-spirited, but one need look no further than his art collection to know what rubbish that characterization is (full disclosure: I've never seen his art collection). Wilder - who himself began as a newspaperman - only happened to foresee what the future ultimately held for American journalism, that's all. Crack a dictionary, dead lady, that's not cynicism. It's soothsaying.
And anyway, if Billy Wilder is so cynical, why is his work universally embraced by each succeeding generation of filmgoers and shamelessly cribbed by anyone that's ever picked up a camera? Of course, Pauline Baby's confrontational, self-absorbed, nose-thumbingly snotty (but in no way cynical) work has itself brow-beaten its way into the lexicon of contemporary culture, but the timelessness of America's Top Model has yet to be determined.
I got my just-released DVD of Ace In The Hole in the mail a couple days ago and watching it again just as the Crandall Canyon Coal Mine Circus came into town, frankly, made my taint hairs stand on end (as did the predictably beautiful new Criterion Collection print, except in a sexier way). Remember what I said about Mr. Wilder's prescience? Well, let's just say that the rescuers in the film also used the drill-from-the-top approach now being employed by the coal mine rescuers, with what will unquestionably be identical results.
Increased circulation.
