Another Billy Wilder movie that had been about to be seen for years was finally coming together, Ace in the Hole (1951). When the film was released, the producer, without the author’s consent, renamed it the “Big Carnival”, but then the original title was restored. There were also disagreements with the genre, some attributed it to
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Another Billy Wilder movie that had been about to be seen for years was finally coming together, Ace in the Hole (1951). When the film was released, the producer, without the author’s consent, renamed it the “Big Carnival”, but then the original title was restored. There were also disagreements with the genre, some attributed it to noir, others disagreed with them. The film, with all the drama of the events taking place, is replete with acutely satirical, downright revealing features. After all, a person is often quite a mean creature, he is ready to do anything in the name of achieving success and his goal. The main character Charles "Chuck" Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is a very ambitious, but extremely cynical and unstable journalist, who has already been kicked out of many newspapers for his antics, comes to Albuquerque and offers himself as a reporter to the editor of the local newspaper Sun-Bulletin, he is hired for a small salary and after a year there, he begins to be burdened with such a boring existence for him, where there are no sensations that can be earned, or even to get him again taken to his former position in the New York newspaper. Once, being sent along with a photojournalist to a local competition in the hunt for rattlesnakes, they accidentally, driving on the way to a gas station, stumble upon a true incident - the local miner of Indian rarities (mainly pots) Leo (Richard Benedict) fell asleep in a cave, where then there was a collapse, he can not get out of there. And this, in general, quite a terrible story begins. Chuck immediately realizes that this can turn out to be a real sensation, develops a stormy activity - calls in the place of rescuers, a doctor, a contractor, but instead of organizing as quickly as possible rescue, he comes up with an option for several days, because in one day for which it could be organized, a real sensation can not be promoted. By various unscrupulous methods, he manages to force him to use the option of drilling the rock instead of using the method of strengthening the walls of the passage with logs that has already been repeatedly used. And the real promotion begins - crowds of people come, reporters from other newspapers come, in the end even an amusement park and musicians come. Meanwhile, Leo’s situation becomes increasingly difficult, and then Chuck realizes that he has gone too far in his pursuit of sensationalism. It ends in tragedy for both Leo and Chuck. Wilder raised a rather serious topic, concerning both the manifestations of people’s personal qualities, and how much people are actually manipulated, as sensationalists, for whom they are willing to go to the ends of the world to gawk, how easily they succumb to the completely ruthless politics of the press, which is ready to literally do anything to be the first to publish some news and the scarier it is, the better. Law enforcement agencies are corrupt, decent people, except for the most naive Leo, who thinks to his last breath about his wife, who only dreams of leaving him, and his parents, are not visible. I liked the film, although in some places it can be accused of some directness, but nevertheless it is well shot and even quite relevant to this time.
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