"Here is, half a century out of the past, a movie so acidly au courant it stings."-Nathan Lee, The Village Voice

(aka The Big Carnival). Ace in the Hole is Wilder's most misanthropic vision of the American mind at work. Kirk Douglas, at his seamy best, plays an opportunistic, alcoholic newspaper reporter who turns the story of a man trapped in a remote New Mexico cave to his own advantage by delaying the rescue operation as long as possible. Gawkers and profiteers languish in the relentless heat, singing "We're coming, Leo," while Leo Minosa dies of cold inside the cave. As Leo's faithless wife, Jan Sterling's soullessness seems tempered only by a fear of the depths to which it can sink. The postwar noirs were not an optimistic bunch, but how this nasty film ever made it out of a Hollywood cutting room in 1950 is some kind of artistic miracle; American audiences naturally repudiated it, while the Venice Film Festival gave it a prize. Today it can be admired for the richly detailed milieu in which Wilder's parable of alienation is etched, like a cave drawing left for the future.