For me this is the best Kirk Douglas has ever been, and Jan Sterling's performance as the tough-as-nails wife of doomed Leo Minosa is also one for the ages. She initially sees her husband being trapped as an opportunity to make a clean getaway. Then she stays only because she can make money, and perhaps because she has the hots for Kirk's reporter character. And even as Leo's plight becomes increasingly dire, she still can't work up a shred of concern or sympathy for her husand of five years. And he's not someone who has ever been mean or mistreated her. She's just bored. What a tough cookie. To Billy Wilder's credit, he never gives her a scene where she's even partially redeemed. She's remains greedy and cold hearted right to the end.
While Douglas and Stirling have the showy parts, the cast is uniformly excellent, and really give the movie a lot of its power and credibility. Porter Hall is nicely understated as the newspaper publisher who gives Kirk a job but never seems all that impressed with him. Bob Arthur as the impressionable young reporter is very good, gradually losing his hero worship of Kirk as he says him for what he is. Ray Teal is memorably slimy as the corrupt sheriff with a weird fascination with his pet snake. Smollet, the engineer, really seems like a small town engineer, and not an actor playing one. Great casting. Richard Bennet as Leo Minosa, the trapped man, imbues his character with dignity and humanity, making you really feel his death. There's no sense of a man giving a performance to gain your sympathy. He is who he is and you accept that. The uniform quality of the acting in these small roles is one of the things that made Billy Wilder a great director. Sadly, now many people think of great directing as showy camera work or spectacular special effects. I watch contemporay movies made by big name directors and often the acting is horrible. It's like directing actors has become a lost art.
"Ace in the Hole" is certainly a wonderful and powerful movie that holds up even after multiple viewings, but there is one thing that I've always wondered about. That Kirk's character never seeks medical attention for his stab wound has always seemed to me questionable. I guess we're supposed to see it as a sort of suicide in atonement for his complicity in Leo's death, but no matter the extent of his self-contempt he's also a narcissist, and narcissists are generally not suicidal. (It would've been a different movie if Kirk's character remained cynical and hard boiled to the end, instead of having the moment of redemption Wilder gives him that he didn't give to Mrs. Minosa.)
While Douglas and Stirling have the showy parts, the cast is uniformly excellent, and really give the movie a lot of its power and credibility. Porter Hall is nicely understated as the newspaper publisher who gives Kirk a job but never seems all that impressed with him. Bob Arthur as the impressionable young reporter is very good, gradually losing his hero worship of Kirk as he says him for what he is. Ray Teal is memorably slimy as the corrupt sheriff with a weird fascination with his pet snake. Smollet, the engineer, really seems like a small town engineer, and not an actor playing one. Great casting. Richard Bennet as Leo Minosa, the trapped man, imbues his character with dignity and humanity, making you really feel his death. There's no sense of a man giving a performance to gain your sympathy. He is who he is and you accept that. The uniform quality of the acting in these small roles is one of the things that made Billy Wilder a great director. Sadly, now many people think of great directing as showy camera work or spectacular special effects. I watch contemporay movies made by big name directors and often the acting is horrible. It's like directing actors has become a lost art.
"Ace in the Hole" is certainly a wonderful and powerful movie that holds up even after multiple viewings, but there is one thing that I've always wondered about. That Kirk's character never seeks medical attention for his stab wound has always seemed to me questionable. I guess we're supposed to see it as a sort of suicide in atonement for his complicity in Leo's death, but no matter the extent of his self-contempt he's also a narcissist, and narcissists are generally not suicidal. (It would've been a different movie if Kirk's character remained cynical and hard boiled to the end, instead of having the moment of redemption Wilder gives him that he didn't give to Mrs. Minosa.)