There were no limits to Billy Wilder’s mastery as a filmmaker: if he had been a chef we would extol the virtuoso range of flavours and textures in his cinema, his ability to tease the palate with a seemingly light and frothy appetiser only to deliver a meaty main straight to the gut minutes later. He is a rare auteur in that his dexterity and ingenuity when handling genre can make you forget the uniqueness of his vision. The more films of his I watch, the more I discern a thread running through his work: his best movies offer lucid accounts of the dark side of the American Dream.
At his darkest and best, Billy Wilder was the sharpest satirist American cinema has produced. And because he satirised a society rife with exploitative cynics, he was often mistaken for a cynic himself. In this, Wilder proves his credentials as a satirist: the more successful satire is, the more it absorbs its target’s grimy outlook. For the satirist catharsis only comes through disgust. But we also forget the hope inherent in satire: our disgust reminds us of our moral centre and fuels the anger necessary for change. I believe that is the reason why Wilder’s films often feature antiheroes whose self-disgust ultimately leads them to moral clarity.
Of all of Wilder’s antiheroes, the protagonist of Ace in the Hole takes the lion’s share of disgust and self-disgust. Kirk Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a disgraced down-at-heel journalist recently arrived in Albuquerque, who stumbles upon a “human interest story” concerning a man trapped in an ancient Native American burial mountain in dusty sun-baked New Mexico and decides to exploit it as his ticket back to the greener media pastures of New York City. The story that unfolds is the blackest, most riveting of all of Wilder’s satires: Ace in the Hole explored the moral quagmire of his characters with such gusto and verve that it proved unpalatable for the American public of the 1950s and the film flopped. Audiences may have been misled into thinking they were in for a musical extravaganza due to the film’s ill-chosen title upon release, The Big Carnival. If this was a carnival: it was one full of grotesques. Tatum’s fall in the film is so spectacular in its sordidness that Wilder had to invent a shot to match it for its closing scene. He dug a hole to put the camera in so that he could capture Kirk Douglas’s final collapse from its very bottom: a rare (and much imitated) display of camera virtuosity for Wilder.
You would think that there isn’t much of an opening for food in the metaphorical and literal desert I am describing but, as a scriptwriter, Wilder knew very well that the devil is in the detail and his films are always full of visual puns and metaphors. They are also well grounded in a naturalistic milieu, so food is often utilised to advance character, plot, theme or vision. In Ace in the Hole, he may have pushed the symbolism of food more than in any other film of his that I can remember: this is true of a memorable shot of Jan Sterling leaning against the door frame of her husband’s trading post as she takes a deliberate bite of a shiny and crunchy apple. Sterling plays the platinum-haired wife of Leo Minosa, the man trapped in ancient debris in The Mountain of the Seven Vultures (the name of the mountain also seems to anticipate the feeding frenzy that Tatum will unleash out of exploitative greed.) As a disgruntled and parasitical wife she is a tawdrier version of Cora Smith in The Postman Rings Twice. Wilder captures her fall, and by extension the beginning of a collective fall, by having her take a bite of the apple right after Tatum convinces her to stay and play along with his plan to milk her husband’s accident for personal gain.
If Eden is lost it may also serve as a metaphor for the loss of a more innocent (as in blameless) culture in the shape of the decimated and maligned Native Americans on the fringes of the film. Wilder did not break much ground here: Native Americans in Ace in the Hole are as invisible as is usual in American culture and only appear in two guises. Typically, they appear as a uniform silent group refusing to desecrate their ancestors’ burial ground even if to rescue a trapped man (also, by the film’s logic, a grave robber, least we forget that he is driven by greed to endanger his life in a place of spiritual significance). There is also an individuated Native American character working in the Albuquerque newspaper that hires Tatum, and Wilder endows him with dignity in spite of the limited screen time. But by locating the film in New Mexico, with its Indian heritage, Wilder managed to make his critique resonate with American history and the troubled legacy of colonisation and genocide. There is a fine food-related image that stresses the erosion of Native peoples and their culture in the Westernised consumerist America of the 1950s. As a radio reporter interviews the couple that first arrived in the scene following the publication of the first instalment of the entrapment, their two children are included in the frame: two blond and very Caucasian-looking boys eating ice-cream wearing Indian headdress. I register this shot as one of the most acerbic visual puns I have seen: rapacious indifference not only to the suffering of the man buried alive but also to the Native peoples whose monument he has desecrated. Typically for Wilder, the scene is also thoroughly unobtrusive and naturalistic; very few filmmakers make such light of their art.
But if I had to pick one food-related scene in Ace in the Hole it would undoubtedly be the one where the corrupt sheriff played by Ray Teal, thoroughly compliant with Tatum’s ploy to milk his “human interest story” to maximum gain in his bid for re-election, finally finds the right fodder for his pet rattlesnake: chewing gum, still in its silver wrapper. The grubby bottle-blond played by Starling supplied the apple and the unscrupulous sheriff gives us the snake. Wilder uses that most American entertainment, chewing gum, to round up his catastrophe: an un-nourishing and thoughtless cypher for a consumerist culture that has lost its moral compass. A piece of nothing swallowed whole by the blind beast. More than 60 years after its release, Ace in the Hole continues to leave a sour taste in the mouth.
A Fistful of Olives 