This year marks ten years since I wrote Flickchart Road Trip, a weekly 2013 series on the Flickchart blog in which I "drove" throughout the United States, watching one movie I hadn't seen set in each of the 50 states and then dueling it against five other films from that state I'd already ranked, to see where it landed among them. I also wrote a blurb about each movie, like a mini review, as well as a description of what I "did" while I was in that state on my trip. (Since I was actually in none of those states, this part was a lie -- perhaps following in the footsteps of the man featured in this month's film.)
It was a fun and arduous project, since I was not only watching and writing one of these each week, but I was also formatting it and posting it. (And also trying to source the movies, which was not always easy in the days before streaming was huge, and involved me buying some random DVDs that are still kicking around my house somewhere.)
It was especially arduous because I also moved to Australia -- quite unexpectedly, if you had asked me in January when I started Flickchart Road Trip -- and didn't miss a beat despite the massive upheaval and not having internet access in my new house for the first couple weeks. It remains probably the defining example of my dedication to projects I start and my refusal to miss the internal deadlines they involve. The only reason I didn't tell you about it on this blog was that I was still going incognito at that time, writing under the alias Vancetastic rather than my name.
Because I lived in Los Angeles at the time, I started "driving" east from there and would make California my final stop in Week 50. The first two movies I watched both bowled me over, each earning a full five stars on Letterboxd. In Arizona it was Smoke Signals, the moving portrait of life on a modern Native American reservation, and in New Mexico it was Billy Wilder's 1951 Ace in the Hole.
Rarely will you see a more excoriating portrait of the profession of journalism -- which had been, and in some ways still is, my own profession. I loved it.
And it turns out, still do, even though I was way too tired on Monday night to watch it. (I couldn't sleep during the morning baseball games that started at 3 a.m. local time, since it was the end of a very close week of fantasy baseball, which I'm glad to say I won.)
The brilliant thing about Ace in the Hole is that the ways Kirk Douglas' Chuck Tatum is a compromised professional -- corrupt? yes, close to that -- are ethically debatable enough to prompt discussion among journalism professionals. He doesn't lie, cheat or steal -- not exactly -- so the ways he milks his story are potentially within the realm of fair play. However, the real journalists who employ him at his Albuquerque newspaper, where he has landed after a series of previous firings, can tell right away that his methods are sketchy. And is it turns out, they might cost a man his life.
Tatum has been kicking around Albuquerque for a year, trying to return to New York, where he experienced his glory days before getting canned. He's given the editor a great deal on his services in the hopes that exposure is all he needs to get back to the big time. However, a year later, he's still covering lame local ceremonies like the rattlesnake hunt to which he is headed when he learns there's a man trapped in cave, into which he had spelunked in order to acquire buried Native American artifacts.
I was surprised on this viewing to see that Tatum doesn't immediately grasp the opportunity here. It's the cameraman he's traveling with who at first seems more interested in the story. It doesn't take Tatum all that long to realize the chance that's presenting itself, but I found it funny that it takes him any time at all given that he's just given a whole speech about the professional doldrums that is this Albuquerque beat. You'd figure he'd grasp at any straws that present themselves, especially on his way to an assignment that typifies the misery he finds himself in.
But soon enough Tatum is formulating his idea for a long-running human interest story that he can stretch out for days. He's not exactly going to impede the efforts to save this man from where he's buried, ironically just out of reach of a place people can get to. Tatum, the doctor and others can make their way almost to within arm's reach of Leo Minosa, but the unsteady walls of the cave prevent them from going any further to avoid dumping a fatal avalanche of rocks onto the pinned Leo. They bring him food and water and cigars, and at first Leo is pretty jovial about the whole situation. As that stretches on, with crews digging down from above in careful ways to reach him, his outlook becomes steadily more grim.
True enough, Tatum has been able to whip this in to a media frenzy, getting an arrangement with the local sheriff to help promote his reelection in exchange for exclusive rights to comments from the police and being the only journalist allowed to make his way down to Leo. Meanwhile, Leo's wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) seems to be just waiting for him to die, as it turns out they had a bad relationship and Leo was cruel to her. Thousands of people gather around the site, to the extent that a whole commercial shanty town has built up, including amusement park rides -- hence the original title of this film, The Big Carnival.
What makes Tatum so mercenary is that he also plays a role in helping ignore some potentially useful advice about an alternate method of saving Leo -- all so his story can achieve him the maximum possible fame and exposure to the career opportunities he wants.
The overwhelmingly acerbic sensibilities of Wilder really surprised me while watching this film, which I saw at a time that I hadn't yet seen some of Wilder's darker films like Sunset Boulevard and The Lost Weekend. (Actually, my records show that I'd seen Sunset Boulevard, but it was only four months earlier so perhaps my impression of Wilder had not yet fully shifted. Sunset Boulevard also immediately preceded Ace in the Hole in Wilder's career, so what a run for him.)
And what a mature understanding Wilder showed of the fickle media cycle, where a story becomes a sensation for a week at a time and then is completely forgotten once it reaches its resolution one way or another. The characters who are portrayed as heroes probably are not -- not only is Leo bad to his wife, but he was only in the cave on what was essentially a mission of thievery. Of course, those who bring the story to us might be even worse. The carnival outside Leo's cave is a perfect symbol for the overwhelming quantity of attention paid a story while it is hot, and its ability to leave town as soon as it is not.
Because it only just happened, I was reminded of the story of the Titan, the Titanic submersible that was lost last week, killing its five occupants. Although there would have been no Chuck Tatum figure, the man with the exclusive who kept the story in our news feeds, I can imagine that news editors everywhere wanted that story to go longer without a definitive resolution, since we all eagerly refreshed our browsers for updates on it. When the debris was found, meaning the loss of the souls aboard, we all quickly moved on and I bet many of us have not even thought about it again since.
Douglas, accustomed to being a hero at the time I think, really leans into the villainy of his character. Chuck Tatum is not fundamentally an awful person, just a selfish one -- as well as a violent one. The way he treats Lorraine, grabbing her hair and once strangling her with a mink shawl, is repulsive. But it would be overplaying this film's hand, so to speak, to suggest that Tatum is the epitome of evil. He's genuinely ashen when he learns that his own decisions may have doomed Leo. However, one wonders whether the main reason he cares is that the only way he comes out rosy in this whole affair is if they do eventually save the man. If they don't, he can kiss his prospective career gains goodbye.
It seems clear that the same circus surrounding the media, so to speak, has been in place for time immemorial. Still, Ace in the Hole seems prescient about the function the media has in our world today. Although there are very good journalists depicted in this film -- Wilder's message is certainly not that they are all venal and corrupt -- the film certainly has its finger on the segment of the profession that will sensationalize just to sell newspapers. Or get eyeballs. Or accumulate mouse clicks.
Okay, on to another classic in July.
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