by Ed Sikov
On the 11th, the company moved to a location outside Gallup, New Mexico, where Paramount’s advance team had prepared the enormous cliff dwelling, parking lot, and trading post, with room to spare for a traveling circus. Working around cloudiness on the following days, Billy and his crew began shooting crowd scenes. The more they filmed the larger the crowd became. On the 14th, there were about a hundred adults and twenty children. On the 16th, over six hundred extras appeared. Billy knew what he was talking about when he wrote the film: he correctly argued that Paramount didn’t need to recruit all the extras they needed because gawkers would turn up on their own. Wilder and his cinematographer, Charles Lang, managed to organize this transient army and shoot some footage before a cloudburst ended the day’s work early.
The term “media circus” was not yet in use when Billy presciently devised and shot the carnival that springs up around Leo Minosa’s living hell. An entire day was set aside purely for rehearsal; the circus was filmed on Saturday the 22nd on what Paramount’s public relations team claimed was the largest noncombat set ever constructed. The set—235 feet high, 1,200 feet across, and 1,600 feet deep—included the cliff, roadside stands, a parking lot for 500 cars, and kiddie rides and booths and concession stands and musicians. Over a thousand extras showed up that day along with 417 rented cars.
Wilder scheduled a helicopter shot for the following day, when only seven hundred or so extras turned up; they stood by patiently watching as the shot was lined up just in time for clouds to roll in. Clouds and rain prevented shooting for several more days; at some point the company is said to have discovered that meteorologists were conducting high-altitude rain-making experiments directly over the location. The aerial shot was finally filmed on the 25th, just before a real storm hit.
The company moved back and forth between the cliff dwelling location and a church at Old Laguna, finishing up midmorning on August 2, after which everyone returned to the safe, dry, controllable comfort of Soundstages 1, 2, and 5 on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. The production was five days behind schedule.
Wilder complements his attack on journalism in Ace in the Hole with a healthy stab at politicians: the manipulative Tatum is in cahoots with the corrupt local sheriff. As this subplot developed, the Code’s Joseph Breen was decreasingly pleased with the wider social implications of presenting a corrupt law enforcement officer on American movie screens. In early August, he wrote to Paramount to express his concern over Sheriff Kretzer (Ray Teal), “who, we believe, breezes out of the story a little too easily, considering the malice of his misdeeds throughout the body of the story. It is our understanding that some slight additional dialogue will be developed which will make it clear that Kretzer will be answerable for his evil in the near future.” In the release print, Tatum makes a sarcastic remark about helping to reelect the sheriff, suggesting that he and Herbie are going to write some sort of redemptive exposé, but fortunately for the amoral thrust of the film he manages to die before making good on his promise.
Having been shooting Ace in the Hole for two months, Billy was finally ready to complete the script on September 5. The production wrapped on the 11th, after Billy made sure to consult a physician for advice about the exact way in which a man lying immobile and partly crushed in a clammy, filthy cave would die. It was a morbid shoot in other ways as well. When filming Tatum’s cruelest scene with Lorraine, Douglas got a little carried away. Toward the end of the film, Leo, slipping into the mild delirium of dying, tells Chuck that he has bought Lorraine an anniversary gift—a ratty furpiece that he has secreted away in a duffel bag in the closet—and he asks Chuck to make sure that she gets it. Tatum complies. Lorraine is not impressed. “Gorgeous, isn’t it?” she comments, holding the shabby thing firmly away from her so as not to get too close to it. “He must’a skinned a couple a’ hungry rats.”
Turning to Chuck, she purrs, “You wouldn’t want me to wear a thing like this,” then throws the unpleasant string of pelts on the floor. Tatum picks it up and forces her to wear it. Then he chokes her with it.
With the camera looming over Tatum’s shoulder as he tightens the fur around Lorraine’s neck, Wilder bears down on her as she gasps for breath, then he cuts on action as she stabs Tatum with a pair of scissors. He wants us not only to see her look of terrified helplessness turn to vengeful rage but also to experience as fully as possible Tatum’s look of shock as she shoves the scissors into him. For the over-the-shoulder shot, Douglas fell a little too deeply into his role as he yanked the mangy fur around Sterling’s windpipe. When the take was completed the actress fell backward, desperately gasping for breath. Douglas was horrified. “Good God, Jan! If I was squeezing you too hard, why didn’t you tell me?!” “I couldn’t,” she rasped. “You were choking me.”
Ace in the Hole is one of Billy Wilder’s two most personal films. He wrote, produced, and directed it with less interference than he had ever been cursed to receive before. It is about a fast-talking smart-ass who despises the world he lives in and plies all the seediness and corruption he encounters to his own advantage, knowing that the millions of idiots whose attention he craves will follow his entertaining stories wherever he leads them. Chuck Tatum is a sexual man who aches for and loathes women in equal measure. Indeed, those aspects of women he most detests are those to which he finds himself most attracted. Like Billy himself, Tatum delights in his own offensiveness, playing it for entertaining kicks even if the only person being entertained is Tatum (or Billy, or Billy’s many fans). When he arrives in Albuquerque, he gets out of his towed car and walks toward the front door of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. The sidewalks are full of Indians—women in traditional tribal dresses, men in jeans and tall felt hats. As he enters the office, the first word out of his mouth is supremely insulting. It’s also funny, in a mean, smart-alecky sort of way: “How,” he says to the Native American clipping newspaper articles at a desk. (“Good afternoon sir,” the man answers.) Later, after Wilder dissolves from a shot of Tatum walking directly into the camera to a shot of him walking away, thereby advancing time a full year without shifting the camera an inch, Tatum is still pacing the office, bored and contemptuous of his circumstances and everyone else around him. The Indian assistant brings him his lunch. “Thanks, Geronimo,” says Tatum, not having changed a bit over the course of the intervening year in the heart of the American Southwest.
In his first scene in the office, Tatum spies a middle-aged woman sitting at a desk under a needlepoint wall-hanging. TELL THE TRUTH it reads. He moves toward it, and Wilder pulls his camera in a little closer. “Who said it?” asks Chuck, smartly. “Mr. Boot said it,” she says, “but I did the needlework.” Tatum gives her a nasty reply delivered in such an unctuous tone that she can’t tell whether he’s flattering her or ripping her heart out: “I wish I could coin ’em like that. If I ever do, will you embroider it for me?”
Herbie gets a very different treatment. In his first scene with the youth, Tatum tries to get in to see Mr. Boot, Herbie’s boss. The seasoned pro and the callow apprentice engage in what is really a type of desexualized meet-cute dialogue, sizing each other up verbally as well as visually. Tatum is tough and aggressive, but the handsome kid doesn’t blink. In fact, the two men look each other directly in the eye until Herbie ends the scene by saying to Tatum with an imperceptible nod of approval, “Cagey, huh?” Then he leaves, giving Tatum the chance to whip out a cigarette and strike his match by letting the carriage of Herbie’s typewriter slide across it, making the classic “ding” at the end of the stroke for punctuation. It’s a gimmick Chuck Tatum performs for nobody’s entertainment but his own.
His insults are masterpieces. “Apparently you’re not familiar with my name,” he says to the man he’s desperate to work for. “That’s because you don’t get the eastern papers out here. I thought maybe once in a while somebody would toss one out of the Super Chief and you might have seen my byline.” His self-deprecation is equally well stated: “You’ll be glad to know that I’ve be
en fired from eleven papers with a total circulation of seven million, for reasons which I don’t want to bore you.” (“Go ahead, bore me,” says Boot.) Boot asks him if he drinks a lot. “Not a lot,” he answers—“just frequently.”
“Mr. Boot,” Tatum announces, “I’m a $250 a week newspaperman. I can be had for fifty. I know newspapers backward forward and sideways. I can write ’em, edit ’em, print ’em, wrap ’em, and sell ’em. I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog. Make it forty-five.”
A year later, he is still unhumbled. “When the history of this sunbaked Siberia is written,” he declares in the office to nobody in particular, “these shameful words will live in infamy—No Chopped Chicken Livers. No garlic pickles. No Lindy’s. No Madison Square Garden. No Yogi Berra!” He spins around and faces the prim “Tell the Truth” woman accusingly: “What do you know about Yogi Berra?” “I beg your pardon?” she answers. “YOGI BERRA!” Tatum roars in her face. She pauses: “Yogi? Well, it’s a sort of religion, isn’t it?” “You bet it is,” he says. This tossaway is Billy Wilder speaking directly from his heart about one of the few things he believes in.
Tatum ends up pulling into Leo Minosa’s trading post by pure chance, much the way Marion Crane drives up to the Bates Motel in Psycho, and with similar consequences. He and Herbie have been sent out on assignment—to a rattlesnake hunt. Tatum is scarcely enthusiastic over what he sees as a hayseed ritual, but Herbie, already in Tatum’s thrall, sees ghoulish potential: “You know, this could be a pretty good story, Chuck. Don’t sell it short. That’s quite a sight—a thousand rattlers in the underbrush, and a lot of men smoking them out, bashing in their heads.…” “Big deal,” Chuck gripes. “A thousand rattlers in the underbrush. Give me just fifty of them loose in Albuquerque.” Warming to the notion of mass hysteria, he continues in a kind of reverie. Billy must have had a particularly good time writing this dialogue:
TATUM: The whole town in a panic. Deserted streets. Barricaded houses. They’re evacuating the children! Every man’s armed! Fifty rattlers on the prowl—fifty! One by one they start hunting them down. They get ten. Twenty. It’s building—they get forty, forty-five, they get forty-nine! Where’s the last rattler? In the kindergarten? In a church? A crowded elevator—where?
HERBIE: I give up. Where?
TATUM: In my desk drawer, fan. [Then he clicks his tongue in triumph, just like Doris Dowling does with Ray Milland.]
Tatum’s first scene with the trapped, hurt Leo culminates in a moment of hilariously understated viciousness. The camera is set beside Leo on the floor of the cave so that it peers up in low-angle at Tatum, who sticks his head through an opening in the upper center of the screen as Leo lies helplessly at the bottom. Tatum picks up Herbie’s camera and tells Leo to hold up the fine specimen of ancient Indian pottery he came into the cliff dwelling to loot. When Leo asks what he’s doing, Tatum explains that he’s taking Leo’s picture so he can put it in the newspaper in Albuquerque. Leo—instantly forgetting his own wretched condition—thrills to the prospect of gaining publicity. He doesn’t even notice that Tatum discards the used flashbulb by popping it out smack in Leo’s direction and hitting him with it. Characteristically subtle and restrained, Wilder films it all in a single shot and doesn’t call any extra attention to the used flashbulb as it hits the victim.
Tatum’s ruthless opportunism leads to gratifying mass entertainment as the crowds roll in to share the catastrophe. The Federbers, Mr. and Mrs. Middle America, and their two boys eagerly pull up to the trading post in a camper, having read about Leo’s terrible ordeal in the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. Mr. Federber (Frank Cady) phrases his morbid excitement with perfect duplicity: it’s a good educational opportunity for his sons, he says, though the boys are fast asleep in the backseat and he has to wake them up to share the thrill. The Federbers are not even the first bystanders. A family is already standing near the opening of the cave when Chuck and Herbie arrive. Soon there are hundreds. Before too long a snarling teenager mans the gate and extracts payment even from Herbie, who tries to beg off as a member of the press. “Two bits,” the boy insists, and just in case Herbie still doesn’t get it, he spells it out: “Twenty-five cents. Everybody pays. Mrs. Minosa says so. Now keep moving.”
Herbie himself is increasingly pleased with the way the story is unfolding. Earlier he was concerned about Leo; now he’s talking about getting a four-page spread in Life or Look. “You like it now, don’t you?” Chuck declares, beaming in approval as he hits Herbie playfully on the side of the head. The knock brings back a bit of Herbie’s compassion, though he continues to deny his own culpability: “I like the break,” he clarifies. “We didn’t make it happen.”
Lorraine plays the worried wife at times, but mostly she’s too busy slinging burgers for the crowds, who reach across the counter waving their hands and empty plates in an image worthy of Nathanael West. Itchy and greedy, she comes into old Mr. and Mrs. Minosa’s bedroom (which Mr. Minosa has gratefully given to Chuck), but she doesn’t say anything right away. Tatum gets impatient. “Come on, come on, what is it?” he says, snapping his fingers restlessly in a gesture familiar to anyone who ever met this film’s director. Lorraine talks of the day’s proceeds and begins to calculate. “By tonight it ought to be a hundred and fifty. Seven times a hundred and fifty—that’s over a grand!”
She goes on: “That’s the first grand I ever had. Thanks.” She snuggles in a little closer and with a certain gleam in her eye says, “Thanks a lot.” Chuck advises her to keep on playing the anxious little lady. Lorraine keeps smiling. He tells her to wipe the smile off her face. She doesn’t. She grins even more broadly, steps closer, and says, playfully, “Make me.” He slaps her twice, hard, backhanding her the first time and then whacking her with the flat palm of his hand as a kickback. Lorraine grabs her cheek and stares, shocked and hurt. “That’s more like it,” he says.
“He didn’t ‘direct,’” Jan Sterling has observed. “He never said, ‘A little more this,’ or ‘A little more that.’ He used the camera as his instrument of direction. He knew what he wanted to show and what he wanted to see. He never stopped and said, ‘No, that’s not right, let’s do it again.’ He just uses your own personality—and the camera.” Asked about Wilder’s misogyny as reflected in the part of Lorraine Minosa, Sterling was adamant: “No, no, absolutely not. She may have been hateful to the observer, but when you were playing her, you understood absolutely why she did what she did. She wasn’t happy. People do very odd things when they’re not happy. She felt she had a right to be mean to Tatum. She wasn’t on the make or anything—she just wanted out.”
The masses, meanwhile, immerse themselves thoroughly in the ongoing festivities. The Federber children soon sport Indian headdresses purchased, no doubt, from Lorraine. Mr. Federber even gets the chance to be interviewed on the radio. “Mr. Federber,” the announcer cries, “what is your reaction to this wonderful job being done here?” “Well,” says Federber, “I think it’s—wonderful! I run up against accidents all the time. I know what I’m talking about. I’m in the insurance game myself—you never can tell when an accident is going to happen! I sure hope Leo had the good sense to provide for an emergency like this! Now you take my outfit—the Pacific All-Risk. We have a little policy….”
Leo looks progressively worse, but Wilder doesn’t much care about him either, using him merely as a foil for his own bilious observations on human nature. From a high-angle shot of Leo lying in his dark grave talking about Lorraine, the precious love of his life, Wilder cuts to an eye-level shot taken in broad daylight of Lorraine watching approvingly as the circus rolls into Escadero. On the side of each truck is painted (without any further comment from Billy) “The Great S&M Amusement Corp.” Minosa’s trading post is crammed full of customers. A waitress struggles through the crowd holding a platter of food. Parents are buying headdresses. Tourists wave trinkets. Everybody is happy. It is Billy’s most corrosive vision of post
war America.
Wilder then launches into one of the most disturbing sequences of his career. It’s really two sequences, but the transition between them is as much a link as a division. Herbie and Chuck are alone in “Chuck’s” room after Chuck receives the news that he’s gotten his old job back at a huge salary. He has promised to take Herbie along with him, and they grin at each other, pleased at the prospect of heading east together. Chuck reaches around and grabs Herbie playfully by the neck just as Mrs. Minosa enters with her votive candles. Wilder’s camera turns away from the two men, panning with Mrs. Minosa as she walks to a little shrine, replaces the old candles, and lights the new ones. Wilder then cuts back to a two-shot of Chuck and Herbie as Chuck removes his hand guiltily from Herbie’s neck.
Fade to black. Fade-in to a shot of crowds of people and cars marching to a nasty little anthem Billy commissioned from Paramount’s Oscarwinning songwriting team, Livingston and Evans. The rotten circus is in full swing. Wilder cuts to a country-western singer crooning the song, then pans to reveal a woman in a black cowgirl outfit selling copies of the tune for twenty-five cents apiece. Pulling his camera back over the heads of eager buyers waving money and grabbing sheet music, he pans to the right and cranes up higher over the crowd as the “Leo” song fades out on the soundtrack; it is replaced by the garish thud of a circus oom-pah-pah band. After a cut, Wilder cranes down to Sheriff Kretzer giving a self-serving speech to a crowd of lemminglike onlookers. A montage follows, in which we see, among other things, the Federber family happily enjoying a ride on the Ferris wheel. Mr. Minosa is shown handing out sandwiches to the workers. Wilder pans with him, following him to the ledge overlooking the carnival parking lot as cars pour into the site in long distance. Mr. Minosa stares out in dumbstruck wonder as a train arrives on the track in the extreme background. Wilder cuts to a closer shot of the train as it pulls into Escadero; a huge sign on the train itself reads LEO MINOSA SPECIAL. Tourists jump off even before the train stops, and they run at full speed across the highway and the parking lot in a race to get closer to the tragedy. Wilder pans with these stampeding morons, staring both horrified and gloating at the country that adopted him.
