Tag Archives: Ace in The Hole

NAKED ALIBI (Jerry Hopper, 1954)

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Is Al Willis (Gene Barry) a humble baker or a gangland psychopath? Is Chief Inspector Joe Conroy (Sterling Hayden) condoning police brutality or is he merely doing his job? Marianna (Gloria Grahame), a girl who gets hit and might like it, will be the key to the solution.

A girl who gets hit and might like it:

 

Gloria Grahame’s introduction in the film, lip-synching to Jo Anne Greer’s rendition of  Cole Porter’s ‘Ace in the Hole,’ is sublime: external desirability as an evocation of sexual alienation; the body a sad, desultory last-chance exchange mechanism; each shimmy a tired indication that there really is no way out; another of the already innumerable reason why Grahame is such an essential figure in noir.

Gloria Grahame Intro

NAKED ALIBI  is beautifully lit by the great Russell Metty, so that light and its absence becomes an additional layer of signification into what the actors, dialogue and framing are already evoking; beautiful, bleak, expressive. It was partly shot in Tijuana and director Jerry Hopper intelligently weaves in the physical and metaphorical dimensions of a’ border-town’ into the story.

Russell Metty lighting:

Windows and Mirrors as Framing:

Hayden is lanky, cool, with a very expressive body but minimal facial movement, and eyes suggesting that he’s seen it all and nothing he’s seen is nice. The police ‘win’ of course, but only On the surface. This is a film where there’s a victory but one without victors: no one really wins. At the end, Joe Conroy, having already lost much, walks under a lamp-post and into a dark, dark night. Alone.

Chuck Connors, even taller than Hayden, appears in an early role:

The Indicator disk has also has a superb ten minute film demonstrating what it is a cinematographer does, featuring Karl Struss, who shot Murnau’s SUNRISE and many other films. Billy Wilder briefly appears on-set.

José Arroyo

Owais Azam on Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951)

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Piercing through a small-town in New Mexico – a once desolate land littered with not much more than tumbleweed and the faint squeals of lonely wind – is a train transporting a parade of people. Not only is the steam radiating from the locomotive polluting the surrounding area, but so are the cheers of exhilaration from its passengers as they get off and run towards what looks like an amusement park, refusing to waste time by allowing the train to reach a steady halt. Venturing toward the bursting circus composed of Ferris wheels, food trucks, and camper vans, they sing a cheerful song with the continuous chorus, “We’re Coming, We’re Coming, Leo!”. Amid this frenzied excitement, these lines remind us that this is not just any ordinary circus. It is one built around the spectacle of one man, Leo Minosa, who has been stuck under a cave for days and is slowly dying. Whilst banners and songs rave a collective public support for Minosa and the workers trying to save him, the twisted transformation of the surrounding landscape into a place for nauseating consumerism and zestful exuberance suggests otherwise. These stark moments – captured through a singular crane shot – do well to encapsulate the cynicism of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), a bleak portrait of an almost-entirely corrupt and crooked America and its rotten capitalist core, ironically released at the height of McCarthyism.

 

Sharply orchestrating this literal and figurative media circus is our cut-throat anti-Hero, Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas). Tatum, an adept yet alcoholic and incongruously ‘anti-Truth’ newspaper reporter who has been fired from several of his previous jobs, finds himself working as a reporter for the local paper in Albuquerque. It’s a certain relegation from his previous workplace in New York, which leaves him thirsty for a “Tatum special” to leave readers and papers “rolling out the red carpet” for him. Accordingly, once Tatum happens to discover the trapped Minosa, he knows he has struck an ace in the hole; Tatum disturbingly plans to keep Minosa stuck in the cave for days so he can extract a running story directly from Minosa’s pain and suffering – a morally bankrupt scheme organised by a morally bankrupt man.

Despite initially being confronted by various people who aim to interrogate Tatum’s intentions and plot, he tries and succeeds in roping many of them along through either bribery, blackmailing, or sheer charisma. Most of Wilder’s characters in the Ace in the Hole are as corrupt as each other – the only question being what it takes for them to fold. And so, whilst Tatum epitomises both the sickening greed of capitalist profiteering and below-the-belt rotten journalism (all the more relevant in the digital age of ‘fake news’), Wilder refuses to stay clear from displaying the public’s wily desire to both indulge in exploitation for their own individual profits, and their ravenous desire to indulge in sensationalised stories about the downtrodden. Indeed, it may be Tatum selling us the ticket – but we’re the ones buying it.

Owais Azam