Ace in the Hole, a.k.a. The Big Carnival (Paramount, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, September 26) my husband Charles and I followed up Some Like It Hot with a quite different Billy Wilder film on Turner Classic Movies: Ace in the Hole, a 1951 masterpiece about the media and how people are manipulated by unscrupulous figures who frame their coverage of real events to move them emotionally. Ace in the Hole was Wilder’s first film after Sunset Boulevard (1950) and his first since breaking up his long-standing collaboration with producer Charles Brackett. He was riding high at his studio, Paramount, and after the sensational success of Sunset Boulevard he was able to get just about anything he wanted green-lighted. What he wanted to do was the story of a burned-out reporter named Charles “Chuck” Tatum (Kirk Douglas) who’s been fired by 11 different publishers and is now forced to work for the Albuquerque Star-Dispatch under editor Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall). Boot has a woven sampler framed on his wall with the words “TELL THE TRUTH,” which Tatum seems to regard as an insult. A year into his sentence at the Star-Dispatch, Tatum stumbles on a story which he figures can create a sensation that will be a springboard to restore him to the world of big-city journalism. A man named Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) has got trapped in a cave-in as he was exploring for Native American relics he could sell in his curio shop and trading post. Tatum immediately sees the story potential in Leo’s predicament, but only if it can be stretched out long enough to stay on the nation’s front pages for at least a week, especially after he hears that the local Natives have nicknamed the cave “The Curse of the Seven Vultures” and said there’s a curse on it that will kill anyone who removes artifacts from it: an easy and obvious “news hook” Tatum exploits to the hilt. Wilder and his co-writers, Walter Newman (who came up with the original idea under the title The Human-Interest Story) and Lesser Samuels (who joined the writing team because he’d worked on newspapers himself), have Tatum make common cause with the local sheriff, Gus Kretzer (Ray Teal), even though his nominal boss Boot is convinced that the sheriff is corrupt and the Star-Dispatch should be exposing him instead of cozying up to him. A local contractor named Sam Smollett (Frank Jaquet), who got the job through the sheriff’s influence, insists he can rescue Leo by shoring up the cave walls and he can do that in 16 hours. But that isn’t long enough for Tatum: instead he suggests that Smollett bring in a drill and bore a hole through the top of the mountain to rescue Leo from above, even though that will take a week.

Tatum’s copy gets picked up nationwide and leads to a sudden influx of people to visit the site and wait out Leo’s ordeal. This is a boon for Leo’s dissatisfied wife, Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling, who turns in a first-rate performance as a hard-bitten woman that should have made her an overnight star if Ace in the Hole had had the box-office success it deserved), who suddenly is doing huge amounts of business at Leo’s combination diner, gas station, and curio store. The influx of cash just reinforces her dream of leaving Leo, whom she married exactly five years earlier (their anniversary is a key plot point in the movie) only to find herself stuck in the middle of nowhere miles away from the wild life she craves. As Leo’s ordeal continues and his medical condition deteriorates despite the doctor (Harry Harvey) on scene, who’s sending him painkillers with which he can inject himself, so does his will to live, especially since the ceaseless pounding of the drill above him is keeping him from falling asleep. Meanwhile, a carnival has set up outside Leo’s cave and a country-music artist has written a song called “We’re Coming, Leo” and is performing on a makeshift stage while selling sheet-music copies of it to the captive audience. In one of Wilder’s cleverer in-jokes, the first outside person to show up at Leo’s ordeal is Al Federber (Frank Cady), an insurance salesman with the Pacific All-Risk company: the same outfit Fred MacMurray’s character worked for in Wilder’s 1944 classic film noir Double Indemnity. (Porter Hall, who plays the idealistic publisher Boot in Ace in the Hole, was in Double Indemnity too, as the fellow passenger on the train who briefly threatens to expose the murder plot involving MacMurray’s and Barbara Stanwyck’s characters.) Tatum tells his photographer and sidekick Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) midway through the story that they’re turning in their notices to the Star-Dispatch and offering their future copy to whichever big-city newspaper makes them the highest-paid bid, and the winner is Tatum’s former boss in New York, Nagel (Richard Gaines). Only Tatum’s finely honed plan goes awry when Leo announces that he literally has only hours to live, and if they don’t get him out of the cave soon he’s a-goner. Leo even pleads with Tatum to bring him a priest to administer the last rites.

Realizing that the great human-interest story he’s been pushing on the world won’t be worth a hill of beans if he can’t provide it a happy ending, Tatum asks contractor Smollett if they can get Leo out through the original plan of shoring up the cave walls – only Smollett tells Tatum that shoring won’t work anymore because the drilling has so weakened the cave walls that any attempt to enter the cave with the beams needed to shore it will risk a cave-in that will kill the crew. Meanwhile Lorraine, who’s been hoping she could seduce Tatum into taking her to New York with him, gets so angry that, after he nearly chokes her with a raggedy stole Leo had bought her as a wedding present, she stabs him in self-defense with a pair of scissors. Tatum learns that Leo has died with the drill just 10 feet away from him, and announces it to the crowd. Nagel, his once and future boss in New York, fires him again after the other papers scoop him on the news that Leo died, and Tatum collapses and dies himself on the floor of the Star-Dispatch newsroom. Ace in the Hole was a major hit in Europe and a major flop in the U.S., and Billy Wilder blamed himself for having pushed his cynicism too far for American audiences. While it had a real-life inspiration – the case of Kentucky coal-miner Floyd Collins, who in 1925 spent 2 ½ weeks trapped inside a mine before he, like Leo Minosa, finally died – Wilder told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in 1969 for their book The Celluloid Muse, “My mistake was in coaxing the American public into the theatre with the idea that they were going to get a cocktail, whereas instead they got a shot of vinegar.” He also said that he’d got the idea of a carnival outside from the real Floyd Collins case: “People criticized me for bad taste, but it all really happened. The audience, unfortunately, doesn’t want to see reality. Maybe I was wrong; maybe I should have tried to get them out of the rut instead of showing it to them on the screen.” As a result, Wilder decided to make mostly comedies for the rest of his career, apparently figuring that he could get audiences to accept his cynical view of the world but only if he leavened it with humor.

During the initial run of the film Paramount executive Y. Frank Freeman ordered its title changed from Ace in the Hole to The Big Carnival – which was the title it had when I first saw it on commercial TV in the early 1970’s and was blown away by it, regarding it as Wilder’s masterpiece. (Supposedly Wilder was so angry with Freeman that he began making jokes about the man’s name – “Why Frank Freeman?” – though elsewhere I’ve heard that joke attributed to two of Paramount’s biggest stars, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Once, the story goes, Hope said to Crosby, “I wish I knew the answer.” Crosby said, “What’s the question?,” and Hope answered, “Y. Frank Freeman?”) Ace in the Hole is also an example of the unfortunate course of Kirk Douglas’s career; in his early films (not only this one but The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Out of the Past, I Walk Alone, and Detective Story) he often played villains and he was quite good at it, but later on he became such a big star he could only be cast as heroes. While Ace in the Hole was far from the first film to depict journalists as amoral assholes interested only in “getting the story” no matter how many people they hurt in the process – Charlie Chaplin’s very first film, Making a Living (1914), had that sort of plot line – it’s a magnificent movie that could easily be remade today and might even be a hit in today’s market, given that Americans are losing faith in all their major institutions, including the media.