Within the first five minutes of Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas does one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen: hitting the carriage return button on a typewriter and while holding a match to the machine, igniting it so that he can light his cigarette. It’s also the last thing he does before we find out what kind of man he really is, and our respect for him is going to vary a lot over the next hour and a half. Douglas is Charles Tatum, a newspaperman extraordinaire, who’s worked in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and every other major news center in the U.S., and he’s lost his job in every one because he brings about libel suits, gets involved with the publisher’s wife, or gets caught drinking “out of season.” He tells all this to Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall), the editor, publisher, and owner of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, when he finds himself stranded in New Mexico. Boot, a man who is notably wearing both belt and suspenders, tells him that he’s also the town lawyer and edits every word before printing, that Mrs. Boot is a grandmother thrice over who would be flattered to be on the receiving end of Tatum’s attention, but that he won’t tolerate any liquor on the premises. Tatum sees this as an opportunity to start small and transition back to the big leagues, but after a year of dull news and a lack of anything exciting, he’s grown restless. 

He and the paper’s young photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) are sent on a trip to cover a rattlesnake hunt, but when they stop for gas in a place called Escudero, they find the station and its attached diner empty, save for a grieving older woman who does not greet or notice them. Realizing that there’s some ruckus going on behind the place at some nearby caverns, they start to drive up and come upon Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling), who tells them that her husband has been caught in a cave-in while exploring some “Indian” caves (the film never identifies the tribe other than a reference to the Minosa’s cafe selling Navajo blankets, and since Escudero doesn’t seem to be a real place, we don’t even have a region that would allow us to determine the tribe from a territory map). They drive up to the mouth of the cave and Tatum talks his way past the deputy and, given blankets and coffee by the buried man’s father, enters the cave, where he meets Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) and, turning on the charm, convinces the man to trust him. 

Intending to capitalize on the potential human-interest story, Tatum sets up shop in the Minosa’s motel/gas station/cafe and gets to work, taking the story of a veteran trapped in a cave-in and pairing that with the sensationalist story that he may have been the victim of vengeance from “Indian spirits” due to his treasure hunting in the appropriately ominously named “Mountain of the Seven Vultures.” When he discovers Lorraine preparing to leave the next morning with the eleven dollars she takes from the till and convinces her to stay, at first attempting to appeal to her wifely love for her husband and, when this tack doesn’t work, promises that she’ll find herself rich enough to take off with a lot more than eleven dollars if she sticks around and plays along. Tatum manipulates all involved, as he charms the sheriff (Ray Teal) as well, promising him re-election as he will play the part of the local hero coordinating activities; the sheriff, in turn, manipulates the engineer in charge of getting the man out to switch from his initial plan of putting in supporting struts to secure the passageway and getting Leo out in about a day to a more involved, visually striking plan to drill down through the mountain to get him out, which will stretch the operations out to five to seven days. The whole thing turns into a media circus — literally at one point, as the number of people drawn in by the spectacle starts to enter quadruple digits and the carnival is brought in. As Tatum becomes more energized and starts getting calls from the big city papers again, he continues to gamble with Leo’s life (hence the title) as he tries to get back on top. 

This is a whip smart movie with fast, witty dialogue, so sharp that it could shave your chin. Douglas is phenomenal, bigger than life, so much louder and more boisterous than everyone around him that you can see clearly that it’s not just his ability to read people and offer them exactly what they want; it’s his pure charisma and the way that he takes up all the air in the room. Sterling’s performance, however, is the standout to me. You’d think it would be impossible to make us like a woman who’s willing to use her husband’s physical entrapment as an excuse to escape, but she so effectively captures the boredom and tiredness of being trapped in a desert nowhere. When Tatum invokes her need to repay her husband for marrying her and giving her a life, she tells that him that she was fooled by his promise that he owned sixty acres and “a big business,” with the acres amounting to useless sand and the business being a place where she “sell[s] eight hamburgers a week and a case of soda pop” while Leo continues to treasure hunt in a clearly unsafe cave. She’s been repaying him for five years, she says, and she’s ready to get out; she’s vain and apathetic about her husband’s situation, but she’s also got a point. 

She’s among the few people who can give Tatum a run for his money in the sass department, including an early defining character moment when he asks if they can put him up for the night and she responds with “Sixty beautiful rooms at the Escudero Ritz. Which will it be, ocean view or mountain view?” Tatum’s editor Boot can also go toe-to-toe with him on occasion, as evidenced by him pulling a nickel out of his pocket and handing it over to Tatum when they first meet and Tatum negs the Sun-Bulletin by way of leading up to the offering of his services. Perhaps most fun, however, is the one-scene appearance of Richard Gaines as Nagel, a fiery, tempestuous New York editor who makes J.K. Simmons’s J. Jonah Jameson look like a bored Brian Williams. The people who can’t compete with him generally fall under his spell. The sheriff, for his part, is utterly guileless in his corruption and ability to be manipulated and goes so far as to have “Re-Elect Gus Krentz for Sheriff” painted on the side of the mountain one night, which is so comically odious that you almost have to respect him. He’s not as smooth or as clever as Lorraine, but he is devious, and willing to twist any arm that he can get his hands on, if it puts a penny in his pocket. 

The thing about gambling is that you can only ride a lucky deal for so long, and if you keep on going and keep on pushing, your luck will eventually run out. Tatum’s right about the cynical nature of the public—eighty-four people trapped in a mine is not as newsworthy as one man—but he’s also haunted by the same flaws that cast him out of the metropoles and into the desert in the first place, including his insistence that he doesn’t “make things happen, [he only] write[s] about them.” By the time he starts drinking again, he’s already lost his way completely, not that he was ever the most respectable member of the fourth estate. It’s not merely enough that he’s coercing reality into a narrative that he can sell, it’s that he’s also pushing the limit of Leo’s endurance, as he starts to develop pneumonia due to being unable to move for days, and he’s corrupting sweet Herbie all the while. 

There’s really only one way this could all end, but I won’t give it away, as this is one that should be experienced in its entirety. And if you know the Hays Code, you know that everyone here has to be punished for their sins, although how that plays out is still a fantastic watch, and this has become my new favorite Douglas performance. The film is marred by some casual racism; the widespread use of the blanket term “Indian” is definitely a product of a different time, and it’s worsened by Tatum’s treatment of a Native American employee of the Sun-Bulletin, whom he first greets with “How” and later calls “Geronimo.” Still, there’s a reason that this one was rediscovered after many years being treated as a failure. Openly critical of both the police and media, it was an embarrassment to the studio, only becoming more widely known since its 2007 Criterion release. It’s not perfect, but it is great. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond