What Do Kirk Douglas and the Chilean Miners Have In Common?
October 16th, 2010
Not much, really, but now that the miners are leaving the hospital and settling in to their new lives in which they’re surrounded by lawyers and agents and reporters and teevee cameras, it’s a good time to check out Billy Wilder’s excellent (and in many ways forgotten) film, Ace In the Hole, sometimes referred to as The Big Carnival.
The IMDB page for the movie describes the plot like so: A frustrated former big-city journalist now stuck working for an Albuquerque newspaper exploits a story about a man trapped in a cave to re-jump start his career, but the situation quickly escalates into an out-of-control circus. There’s a longer synopsis over on the Turner Classic Movies site; unfortunately, they don’t have the film scheduled for broadcast anytime soon. They’d do well to rush it onto their schedule, pronto.
As IMDB points out: Actor Victor Desny brought a lawsuit against this film while the script was being written. He claimed the film was an unauthorized version of the Floyd Collins story. Collins was actually stuck in a cave years earlier, as mentioned in the film. Since Desny owned the rights to the Collins story, he claimed copyright infringement. Desny prevailed, although Wilder appealed. The California Supreme Court ruled in Desny’s favor.
If you still need convincing for adding this to your Netflix queue, check out Roger Ebert’s excellent review in which he notes: “The film’s harsh portrait of an American media circus appalled the critics and repelled the public; it failed on first release, and after it won European festivals and was retitled ‘The Big Carnival,’ it failed again.”
Of course, it’s hard to imagine any combination of mine accident and media circus, right? Or that there would be any level of cynicism involved in the event. After all, that only happens in the movies.