by Ed Sikov
The carnival sequence derives at least some of its malignant force from the intimate scene that precedes it. As in Double Indemnity, the sole redemptive relationship Wilder creates for his protagonist is with another man, only this time he takes the form of a good-looking, impressionable youth rather than a surly-lovable father figure. The transition from Tatum’s affectionate horseplay with Herbie to Mrs. Minosa and her votive candles is crucial. It’s guilt-inducing for Tatum—one of two such moments in the film. His guilt has nothing to do with the circus he created; he registers it before the carnival montage. And his guilty expression is sharp and affecting despite the fact that Mrs. Minosa’s reverence is so unconvincing. (Billy resorts to bathing her face with the conventional key light Hollywood tends to employ as visual shorthand for piety. On the other hand, maybe that’s his point. Ace in the Hole is so bitter that even the victim’s mother’s grief looks phony.)
The second revelation of Tatum’s guilty self-awareness occurs in a similar all-male context. Leo cries out for a priest to administer the last rites, and Tatum, disregarding his own fatal stab wound, brings one to him. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” says Leo in close-up, at which point Billy cuts to an even tighter close-up of Tatum. With the camera in his face, it’s Tatum himself who receives absolution. Leo says “I’m sorry” in voice-over, but given the placement of the camera, it’s Tatum who feels the greater remorse.
Wilder has better taste than to show the actual moment of Leo’s death. Not only would it detract from the more powerful revelation of Tatum’s self-recrimination, but Wilder also knows that his audience cares as little for Leo as the crowds who flock to the circus at Escadero. Leo Minosa leaves the film just as he entered it—as a means to Tatum’s end. Chuck emerges from the cave, hitches a ride on an ascending crane, reaches the top of the cliff, grabs a microphone, and shouts for silence: “Leo Minosa is dead. He died a quarter of an hour ago, with the drill just ten feet away. There’s nothing we can do anymore. There’s nothing anybody can do. He’s dead, do you hear me? Now go on home, all of you. The circus is over.”
The crowds disperse. The Federbers put away their camping gear. Mrs. Federber weeps, and the big-top tent comes down. Billy films Tatum in a low-angle tracking shot as he walks the distance of parking lot, and though he keeps cutting away to show other aspects of the circus’s end, he keeps returning to the shot of self-loathing Tatum. Lorraine, meanwhile, merely walks down the steps of the trading post with her suitcase, misses her bus, and heads down the road on her own. She faces no retribution or punishment for stabbing a man to death. Tatum dies, slowly, from the wound, but Lorraine just disappears.
Tatum returns to the offices of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin so he can exit the film in style. In one of the few attention-calling setups of Wilder’s life, the camera is on the office floor looking up at Tatum in extreme low-angle. “How’d you like to make yourself a thousand dollars a day, Mr. Boot?” Tatum asks. “I’m a thousand dollars a day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing.” He staggers toward the camera and drops dead, pitching headfirst onto the floor, his face inches away from the lens. If Billy couldn’t begin his film with a talking corpse, he ended it by forcing his audience to stare a silent one in the face at the closest possible range.
For the score, Wilder approached Hugo Friedhofer, a Hollywood composer who was always more respected by those he worked with than by the public at large. (He wrote the scores for The Best Years of Our Lives and The Bishop’s Wife, among others.) Originally, Billy wanted Friedhofer to create a more melodic score than the dissonant one Friedhofer gave him. According to Friedhofer, Billy “was upset by the fact that I hadn’t written a schmaltzy score, or at least something Wagnerian, since that’s his favorite composer. When we were recording, he said, ‘It’s a good score, but there isn’t a note of melody in it.’ I replied, ‘Billy, you’ve had the courage to put on the screen a bunch of really reprehensible people. Did you want me to soften them?’ He got the point.”
As though his film wasn’t mean enough, Billy added one last touch. He altered the well-known Paramount logo at the beginning of the film to fit his own personal vision. Walter Newman described the result: “Well, you had the circle of stars but there was no mountain, and you didn’t know quite what you were seeing within that circle. Actually it was an oblique shot from a height of about three feet down at a bit of desert sand. And then a rattlesnake slithered in and suddenly went into coil, its rattles vibrating and buzzing, its jaws wide, fangs exposed and forked tongue flickering, and it was so unexpected women screamed. I even stiffened in my chair…. But the studio was afraid that pregnant women would give birth prematurely right in the theatres if they used that shot and so it was cut.”
Billy brought Ace in the Hole in for $1,821,052—a reasonable cost had the film done reasonable business. But it bombed.
When it was released in May 1951, Ace in the Hole was a disaster at the box office. For the first time in Wilder’s writing-directing life, American audiences either hated what he gave them or simply didn’t care enough to show up and face it. His inaugural one-man show proved to be one of the two most bitter disappointments of his professional life. Billy Wilder was stung—badly. And he was scared. Tellingly, his next three films were adaptations of already successful Broadway plays, he based the fourth on an already best-selling biography, the fifth was another adaptation, and so were the sixth and seventh. Not until 1960, eight pictures later, would he dare to make another film from his own original story.
The Hollywood Reporter’s reviewer set the tone for the American public’s response: “Ruthless and cynical, Ace in the Hole is a distorted study of corruption and mob psychology that, in this reviewer’s opinion, is nothing more than a brazen, uncalled-for slap in the face of two respected and frequently effective American institutions—democratic government and the free press.” The film, the Reporter continued, “proceeds on the premise that Americans are a bunch of dopes, easily duped, victims of mass hysteria and emotionally placated by vicarious experience.” According to the Reporter, this was unfair.
By the 1980s, when it had become impossible to argue Wilder’s basic contentions about American media and culture, Ace in the Hole finally found its audience in the United States. But in the early 1950s, with faith in the nation’s ideological institutions assuming fanatical religious proportions, Wilder was offering a vision of Americans and their news media that few Americans themselves wished to confront, let alone applaud. Jan Sterling is blunt on the subject: “You know why it was a failure? Columnists came out and said it could have been made by Art Kino [the Soviet company]. They seemed to feel it was anti-American.” Ace in the Hole found greater favor in Europe. British critics heartily approved of Wilder’s attack on American values, and the film ended up winning one of three “International Awards” at the Venice Film Festival. But Paramount Pictures wasn’t especially impressed with the award. What the studio wanted was a healthy box office return on its investment, and Wilder, for once, didn’t give it to them.
Like Chuck Tatum, Wilder was prone to bragging. He’d always enjoyed rubbing the noses of others in his own success, but now the tables had turned. “Cut it out, Chuck,” one of Tatum’s reporter-colleagues tells him while Tatum is still flying high; “We’re old buddies! We’re all in the same boat!” “I’m in the boat,” Tatum snaps; “You’re in the water.” Until the disastrous release of Ace in the Hole, this was true for Billy as well. But thanks to Ace in the Hole, Billy’s boat had just sprung a severe leak. Paramount’s Y. Frank Freeman autocratically changed the title at the very last minute to The Big Carnival, and he did so without Billy’s consent. “Fuck them all,” Billy was heard to shout years later. “It is the best picture I ever made.”
Wilder’s sinking sensation only intensified when he was slapped with yet another lawsuit over plagiarism. Stephanie Joan Carlson never had much of a case with her allegations about Sunset Boulevard. This plaintiff was different. On October 1, 1951, the scree
nwriter Victor Desny filed suit in Los Angeles County alleging that in November 1949, just around the time that Wilder was beginning to work on Ace in the Hole, he, Desny, had submitted the story of Floyd Collins to Paramount Pictures—specifically to Billy Wilder. Now Desny thought he should be paid.
Desny’s case was of a fundamentally different order than, say, the suit launched by Mrs. Florence Peschel of Denver, Colorado, whose fox terrier, Tippy, played the role of Buttons in The Emperor Waltz. (In January of 1951, Mrs. Peschel asked the court for $125,000 in damages for the alienation of Tippy’s affections at the hands of Paramount Pictures.) Desny’s suit was scarcely frivolous. It was most disturbing, because it called into question not only Billy Wilder’s integrity as a writer-producer-director but also the whole system by which Hollywood studios acquired material. According to Desny, in November 1949, Desny told the Floyd Collins tale to Wilder’s secretary, Rosella Stewart, several times over the telephone. (Helen Hernandez had departed with Brackett.) Although he claimed to have told her the story in some detail, he had submitted nothing in written form. He asked for $150,000 in damages.
Wilder’s lawyers responded quickly, arguing first that submitting an idea over the phone was insufficient to prove plagiarism. In addition, they claimed that the material Desny submitted was not legally protected, given the highly publicized and factual nature of the Floyd Collins case. So in June 1952, Desny filed an amended complaint, this time submitting a written treatment of the life of Floyd Collins together with a chunk of Billy’s script as a point of comparison. Later that summer Billy filed papers, denying everything.
Desny argued that his conversations with Rosella Stewart constituted a formal story submission. At first, he described the Collins story only in brief, to which Stewart responded that it would have to go to Paramount’s story department first, and that the story department would condense the material to three or four pages before showing it to Wilder. “I don’t like my story to be hacked,” Desny replied, and he said he’d rather do it himself. “Why don’t you do that,” Stewart answered. The persistent screenwriter called back again a few days later and read Stewart his synopsis, which she claimed at the time to be writing down in shorthand as he told it to her. Stewart’s only comment was that the idea seemed interesting and she would talk it over with Billy. Desny never spoke with Wilder directly.
Judge Stanley Mosk returned a summary judgment in favor of Wilder and Paramount on December 18, 1953, based on the fact that the Collins story was a historical incident. Moreover, the judge was compelled to find for the defendants because no manuscript had been submitted, and an “oral recitation of a synopsis over the telephone cannot be construed to be submission of a written manuscript.”
Desny appealed, of course. The District Court of Appeal reversed Judge Mosk’s ruling in the summer of 1955 and ordered the matter returned to Superior Court for trial. The case went to the California Supreme Court, which eliminated one of Wilder’s and Paramount’s key contentions—namely, that an oral submission was insufficient to prove plagiarism. Thus the defendants found themselves heading to trial without their central line of defense. The case was settled privately in August 1956. Desny won $14,350 and, no doubt, a certain satisfaction.
19. CALCULATIONS
MANFREDI (Michael Moore) (preparing to escape an Austrian prison camp): We stick to the forest west until we hit the Danube.
JOHNSON (Peter Baldwin): Then we follow the Danube up to Linz. In Linz we have a barge and go all the way to Ulm. Once in Ulm, we lie low until night. Then we take a train to Friedrichshafen.
MANFREDI: Once in Friedrichshafen we steal a rowboat, get some fishing tackle, and start drifting across the lake. Always south, ’til we hit the other side—Switzerland.
SEFTON (William Holden): Once in Switzerland just give out with a big yodel, boys, so they’ll know you’re there. It’s a breeze! Just one question: Did you calculate the risk?
—Stalag 17
Hollywood filmmaking was always a big crapshoot, with accent on the crap. Before Billy unexpectedly threw snake eyes in May of 1951 with the release of his latest movie, he had stayed on top of the game for too many years. He was getting bored with so much winning, and he needed some extra risk to keep the game fresh. “Talk is that Billy Wilder may also leave Paramount,” Louella Parsons reported in November 1950; “This, however, I have been unable to check.” No one who knew Billy could have been surprised at the rumor. Ace in the Hole had finished shooting but hadn’t yet been released. There was no reason for anyone, least of all Billy, to think it wouldn’t be another hit. For the moment, he was able to call his own shots, and if that meant leaving the studio that nurtured and sustained his talent for fourteen years, so be it. Billy’s loyalties were above all to himself, and given his constitutional distrust of the human race even that allegiance was questionable.
It was an opportune time to make waves. By the end of 1950, the economic system under which Hollywood had reaped its profits for decades was in full collapse. A year earlier, the government had ordered the studios to deconstruct themselves. Grudgingly, they began to do so. One tends to think of the old Hollywood studios as filmmaking enterprises, but they were really distribution and exhibition companies that supplied themselves with a steady stream of their own product. Paramount, MGM, RKO, Fox, and Warner Bros. owned large and profitable theater chains, and to ensure that these theaters would have a near-constant stock of films to screen, these companies kept the system well oiled by making the films themselves. With the settlement of United States v. Paramount Pictures Corporation et al., the protracted antitrust suit aimed at cracking the Big Five’s monopoly, the so-called studios were forced to divest themselves of their theaters, and Hollywood’s tidy, vertically integrated system fell apart. Independent producers suddenly had a much better crack at providing product, and as power shifted from the old front offices on the big lots in Hollywood to smaller offices located anywhere one chose, an iron-willed, one-man-show director saw the chance to become independent.
Decentralizing also meant destabilizing the chain of command, and in the free-for-all, directors might as well become independent producers, too. With United States v. Paramount, the government handed Billy a brand-new pair of dice. They may not have been loaded, exactly, but they would tend to roll in his favor. His films for Paramount almost always made money, and in the months following Sunset Boulevard’s release the studio had great incentive to keep him. But if he chose to leave Paramount, he could quickly find either another studio to keep him happy at a fine salary or an independent financier to set him up on his own. When Billy and Audrey set sail for Europe on the SS Liberte in early December 1950, he had every reason to be confident. Paramount ended up meeting his terms, and he signed a new three-picture contract immediately before embarking for a three-month tour of the Continent, including stops in London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Italy, and Switzerland.
He was mulling over the idea of making a movie about the dead. The Loved One was a prime candidate for a Hollywood film adaptation, and Wilder was on its trail. What could be more delightful than Evelyn Waugh’s brittle satire on mid-twentieth-century Hollywood funeral rites? Forest Lawn Cemetery, where the corpses of the rich and famous and low and bourgeois earned passage to eternity at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, the cemetery chapel located on the Burbank border? Forest Lawn, where, for a price, you could get yourself and your kids buried in Whispering Pines, Everlasting Love, Kindly Light, and Babyland? By the time he left for Europe, Billy had already discussed with John Seitz the idea of directing The Loved One, and Seitz agreed to shoot it. Billy would be vacationing on the Continent, but part of the time would be spent in London meeting with Evelyn Waugh.
The Loved One was not Billy’s only idea. He’d been interested in adapting Jules Romains’s Dr. Knock for some time. The play concerns a doctor duped into buying a small-town practice only to discover that everyone in town is unusually healthy; he proceeds to convince them that they’re all de
sperately ill and thus spurs the local economy as well as his own career. In January, Paul Kohner wired Billy in Paris to alert him to the fact that a French company had just released its own adaptation of Dr. Knock, and this may have put an end to Billy’s idea. As for The Loved One, whether Waugh himself didn’t go for Billy’s ideas for an adaptation, or Paramount nixed them, or Wilder simply lost interest, The Loved One went into hibernation. Instead, Billy turned his sights to a Maurice Chevalier film.
A New Kind of Love was to be a romantic comedy based loosely on some incidents from Chevalier’s own life. Wilder reportedly considered writing in a role for Marlene Dietrich as well. Returning from Europe in early 1951, Billy planned to turn around and go back to Paris in March for talks with Chevalier. But A New Kind of Love, too, ended up scuttled. American red-baiting was to blame.
Billy himself managed to steer clear of HUAC, Senator McCarthy, and Hollywood’s own homegrown celebrity right wing and thereby stay afloat as a filmmaker. Unfortunate others, including the French citizen Chevalier, found themselves drowning in a swamp of radical conservatism in the States. Among Hollywood directors, it was Cecil B. DeMille who saw himself as the right’s great suzerain, and his milquetoast minions agreed. DeMille chose as his battlefield the Screen Directors Guild and its membership lists. First, he set up the DeMille Foundation for Americanism, the chief task of which was to collect dossiers on liberal-left directors. Then, in October of 1950, DeMille tried to take over the Guild itself. Billy’s friend and colleague Joseph Mankiewicz, the director of All About Eve, was in the midst of his term as the Guild’s president. He was generally well liked, but his administration suddenly became tenuous when DeMille insisted that all Guild members be required to sign a loyalty oath. Mankiewicz refused. DeMille and his attendants threatened to throw him out of office and force all the directors in town to pledge allegiance to the flag.
