Kirk Douglas has often expressed his theory of acting: find the good in the bad and the bad in the good. In no role of his career do we see this at work more than his performance as Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder's classic "Ace in the Hole". Tatum is a relentlessly ambitious and overtly cynical reporter exploiting a man's misfortune in being trapped in a cave for his own ends. But if that's all he was, he'd be driving away with a smile on his face at the end. But that's not all he is.

He's not the worst character in this gallery of rogues. Jan Sterling's non-suffering wife of the victim is a very cold fish and Ray Teal's sheriff is more of a cold-blooded reptile, like his pet snake. They don't give a damn if Leo lives or dies. It might be better if he's out of the way. But Tatum, even if he's the instigator of the drama, can't go that far. He's merely a rat, dangerous but warm-blooded. And that destroys him. Sterling and Teal move on, better off than they were. Tatum falls dead into the camera. You can have him for nothing.

Tatum's problem is that he isn't quite as bad as he wants to be. He's been treated ruthlessly by life some time in the past and he's in a competitive profession where compassion seems a weakness and the victor gets the spoils- and all the excitement. He put himself on overdrive to compete and show the world he can be as tough on it as it is on him. But he's not quite bad enough to not care about what he's doing to Leo. He's disgusted when he looks at the wife and sheriff and thinks that he's put himself on their level. He punches the sheriff and almost strangles the wife, but finds that doesn't liberate him form his own actions. Those actions have deprived him of the respect of anyone with any goodness left in them, including himself. You can have him for nothing because there's nothing left.

Perhaps Billy Wilder would feel vindicated today after putting this film down as one of his lesser achievements. His own background as a reporter in Vienna and Berlin most likely influenced this story of a cynical newspaper reporter who insinuates himself into his byline to influence events instead of merely reporting them. See, and I thought this was only a modern day inconvenient truth.

I didn't expect "Ace in the Hole" to be the gripping movie it turned out to be. Kirk Douglas is masterful in presenting a character so out of touch with basic human decency that he never considers that sometimes the law of unintended consequences can intrude on one's best laid plans. Down and out reporter Chuck Tatum (Douglas) happens upon a story in the making in the middle of a New Mexico desert, and his overblown ego takes command of the situation. A master manipulator, Tatum convinces a local corrupt sheriff (Ray Teal) to milk an underground rescue attempt to pile up votes for the next election, and together they bully a contractor (Frank Jaquet) to use a rescue method that will take six days instead of eighteen hours. Tatum also latches on to a local legend, the 'Mountain of the Seven Vultures' to add a tense note of mystery and foreboding to his copy, all in an effort to secure a prized position back at his former New York City newspaper.

It's hard not to become angry watching this picture because one instinctively knows that this type of stuff occurs on a daily basis in newsrooms across the country. It's gotten to the point where one can't really trust what appears in print or on the TV screen half the time today, a sorry state of affairs if one relies on accuracy in reporting for any reason at all. The carnival atmosphere that develops around the Leo Mimosa story must have seemed oddly unbelievable, even impossible back when the picture was made, but today it seems about par for the course.

One can figure out where this story is going after a certain point; all that's left is for the finger pointing to start. Admirably, for a creepy character like Tatum, he decides to blow the whistle on his own complicity in causing a man's death, but it's too little too late. The gawkers pack up and leave and those who profited from the spectacle are left to their own seamy existence, including the wife of the trapped miner (Jan Sterling), revealed as callous and hypocritical as the sheriff. In a nod to both true noir sensibility and demands of the Production Code, Chuck Tatum goes down for the final count as the picture closes, knowing just before he drops that the circus is finally over.

It took twenty five years, but when Paddy Chayefsky wrote and scored a critical and popular success with Network it went a long way towards redeeming Billy Wilder and Ace in the Hole from the critical and popular drubbing it took in reviews and at the box office.

The cry then was that Wilder was way too cynical and in the height of the superpatriotic McCarthy days maybe he was for that time. Perhaps Kirk Douglas's Charles Tatem would find employment as a writer at UBS for Howard Beale's mad prophet of the air or at Fox News or if your tastes run the other way, scripting one of Michael Moore's documentaries.

Kirk Douglas is a veteran reporter who's been fired off a whole lot of newspapers and arrives in Albuquerque looking for a job. Editor Porter Hall after an interesting job interview hires him. Two months later, a bored Douglas and cub reporter Robert Arthur are sent on some nothing story and on the way learn of a man, Richard Benedict, trapped in an old cave with a broken leg.

Remembering the real Floyd Collins story from the Twenties about a Kentucky man trapped in a cave for 18 days while America followed every move of the rescue attempt, Douglas smells a return to the big time. With the aid of a corrupt sheriff, Ray Teal, Douglas starts controlling the story and indirectly making the story. Of course things get out of hand.

Kirk Douglas has never been afraid of being seen as unlikeable on screen and in Charles Tatem he's at his most unlikeable. In fact until he did There Was A Crooked Man in 1971, I'm not sure he's ever been this big of a canine descendant. He's matched every step of the way by Jan Sterling who plays Benedict's tramp of a wife who wants her cut of the proceedings and takes it out of Douglas literally.

Ace in the Hole was made when newspapers still were a major source of news. Televisions were still scarce and I don't think it's an accident that Billy Wilder chose a sparsely populated state like New Mexico as the setting. Television sets in the Rocky Mountain states in 1951 were scarcer than the people.

I think Ace in the Hole could be remade today, maybe with Michael Douglas taking over an internet news blog to bring it up to the times. Still Billy Wilder's magical cynical touch would be missing.