Paths of Glory

Stanley Kubrick employs numerous tracking shots in Paths of Glory, using geometric precision to undermine the sense of expansiveness normally evoked in long shots. As the opening narration reminds its audience, World War I was fought for four years in the same area of battlefield where it started. Kubrick's camera tracks down the fortified trenches and, occasionally, in the No-Man's Land between them, moving perfectly forward and backward inside and horizontally outside across hundreds of feet of space. Yet even when not trapped between the walls of earthen lines, the film feels cramped and claustrophobic. Over the top, the sudden erasure of horizontal restriction is canceled out by the simple fact that the wide world outside those trenches matters only insofar as the distance to the next hole forward.

The unnatural movement creates a sense of unease, as if the characters caged within the frame are but lab rats to be exploited and arranged by the man behind the curtain. Ergo, Kubrick, that perfectionist taskmaster, casts himself as the same overbearing general that so casually sent millions to their deaths in World War I. Though Paths of Glory is Kubrick's most earnest and immediately emotional picture, this alignment of filmmaker with a corrupt power structure that places those with the least amount of hands-on knowledge with the various types of people under hum at the top of the heap suggests that his satiric grasp is not dulled for the film's impassioned messaging.

The use of "La Marseillaise" over the opening credits is bombastic but, as we'll soon find out, ironic. The stirring sound of its patriotic brass gives way to a shot of a French château miles away from the front, the drum roll over the soundtrack and the soldiers standing in formation on the mansion grounds wholly at odds with this idyllic view of lingering French aristocracy. Inside, two generals, Mireau (George Macready) and Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), meet for wining and dining in a manner that recalls Renoir's Grand Illusion. Broulard, the direct superior, discusses the top brass' want of a section of German-controlled land called the "Anthill" and wants Mireau to send his regiments to take it. Mireau, aware of how beleaguered his troops are, notes that sending them over the top would amount to nothing more than a suicide mission that would cost hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. Then, Broulard casually mentions that Mireau would be up for promotion if he ordered the attack, and the other general begins planning how an attack would succeed as if he never voiced opposition.

The camera cuts from the expansive, high ceilings of the château to the trenches, where there is no structure hanging between people and sky yet the sudden lack of high-angle shots compresses the frame. As it eerily glides through the ditch in straight lines, the camera resembles a ghost moving unnaturally through the land of the living, or at least the fractured nebula between life and death. Where a handful of wealthy generals occupy the vast castle, these cramped pits hold throngs of men stewing in filth and claustrophobic fear. By maintaining medium level and angle with his camera, Kubrick offers no break in perspective, no chance to feel anything but the stark dimensions of the trench.

For all the obviousness of the script, co-written by Kubrick with Jim Thompson and Calder Willingham, the staging adds degrees of chilling, realistic repulsiveness to the more melodramatic dialogue. Mireau's tour of the trenches is supposed to have that effect of boosting morale, but all he does is offer transparently supportive pablum before slapping around a shellshocked man after stating flatly that there is no such thing as the psychological condition. In Col. Dax's (Kirk Douglas) bunker quarters, he voices dissent with the general, but the lighting and blocking indicates that even the mighty Douglas is in the role of the inferior. If he refuses to send his men to a pointless death (and one costly to the war effort, since it will fray and tatter the front line), Mireau will simply replace him. He agrees to the charge not for personal gain but because it will happen with or without him and he actually has his men's safety at heart.

If Paths of Glory has any one point to make, it's that the titular journey to glory cannot exist in war. On one hand, it is a merciless meat grinder, pushing wave after wave of men through a giant abattoir, and glory is awarded retroactively to the side that say "Enough" last. On the other, it is even more garish, a bureaucratic power struggle that reduces the station of fighting men even below that of animals, all the way down to a number. As Stalin said, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." Mireau, Broulard and the other brass will tally up the numbers before and after and use the outcomes to justify advancement and demotion along an arbitrary hierarchy. It's a cold, merciless overview of humanity, which makes Kubrick, the distant, arty provocateur, the perfect man to examine it.

He calmly establishes the absurdity and meaningless of military ranking with Roget and Paris (Ralph Meeker). Lt. Roget heads a small band of scouts on a reconnaissance mission before the main charge. In the dead of night, Roget prepares for his mission by getting plastered on wine while his two subordinates look on in disgust. Paris went to the same school as Roget, had the same family background and is clearly more competent than the officer, but Roget knew how to play the game and won advancement. During their scouting run, Roget panics and throws his grenade at the other scout and flees back to the trench while Paris confirms that the lieutenant murdered one of his own. When he comes back, he threatens Roget with turning him in, but the officer smiles because he knows a military tribunal will decide he is the more trustworthy and truthful soldier because of the bars on his shoulder. He falsifies his report and goes back to his wine, satisfied that Paris won't bother bringing charges.

As for the battle scene itself, Kubrick captures the terrifying frenzy that Steven Spielberg would later command in his Saving Private Ryan despite his use of more formal technique over visceral hand-held shots. In so doing, the director avoids the side-effect of glamorizing the fight and making it exciting. Compounding this approach is the horrible fact that the French, the heroes against the Germans and the only side focused upon in the film, never gets to fire back, never gets to take an enemy position or do anything but die in droves. The Americans might have been chewed to pieces when those ship ramps dropped in Ryan, but they eventually took the beach. This is nothing but a slaughter, and Kubrick's camera just keeps gliding over the carnage, occasionally panning quickly as if curious to see the strange ways in which mankind destroys itself.

Kubrick's detached approach to the fighting makes for gentle horror: when Dax falls back to a trench to reorganize and plan, the once-cramped area now looks tattered and empty save for the occasional corpse belonging to men who never even managed to climb out of their trap before being mowed down. POV shots of the binoculars show an entire contingent of men who refuse to follow orders, but that telescopic shot become a form of targeting when an enraged Mireau orders artillery to shell his own men to motivate them from the trenches. The artillery captain refuses, ensuring that the mission's inevitable failure will not kill all of the three companies assembled.

At this stage the film kicks into its proper narrative, the court martial trial that arises from Mireau's outrage. He and Broulard invite Dax out to their château to choose men, and Dax sarcastically responds that all surviving members of the charge should be killed. Sufficiently aware that it wouldn't do much good to execute the whole French Army, Broulard whittles down Mireau's 100-man demand to a dozen. Finally, three are to be chosen, one from each company. Dax attempts to volunteer himself, saying he was the officer in charge, and his pointed glare withers Mireau's fire as the man shrinks away from Douglas' stone face. Broulard dismisses that idea outright, not wishing any officers to lose face. Besides, he probably knows that killing an officer for incompetence might raise morale so much the enlisted might start doing it for entertainment.

The trial itself is so farcical that Kubrick deserves credit for not lapsing fully into comedy. The three men are chosen harshly by their superiors: Paris gets sent by Roget to ensure no word ever gets out about his friendly fire, Pvt. Ferol (Timothy Carey) goes because his C.O. finds him a "social undesirable," and Pvt. Arnaud, twice decorated for bravery, found himself sent to trial when his company drew lots to find the "guilty" party. Each is hammered by the prosecution, who delivers his questions with sneering contempt, as if he not only will send his compatriots to their death but wants to. Kubrick frames each soldier's examination in medium close-up, allowing us to peer behind their faces to see the other two defendants seated in front of armed guards, the slightly shallow focus allowing us to seem the clearly while still emphasizing the space that isolates each; they may be tried together, but they're being torn apart separately to prevent any connection of defense. When the camera pulls back to a high-angle long shot at the back of the hall, we see the soldiers aligned on alternating black and white tiles. The dominant visual metaphor of Dr. Strangelove was a poker table in the War Room; Paths of Glory evokes chess. Either way, those in charge continue to play games using those without.


Not even the verve of Douglas' screen presence can sway the jury determined to carry out its "example." Kubrick ironically used Douglas, one of the great antiheroes, as a beacon of true morality and heroism in both this and Spartacus, yet both films turn that inversion over once more by making Douglas' sudden purity wholly inadequate to stop the mounting fatalism of both endings. The other voices are clear in the mix as they give testimony or ask questions of the prosecuted, but Dax's voice echoes in the vast parlor, communicating less the power and authority of his words than the futility of fighting. His words break and fade into nothingness while the generals continue smirking. At the end of the film, Dax meets with the generals once more to bring charges against Mireau for trying to fire on his own men in battle, and Broulard believes he knows the colonel's motivations, believing him to be throwing Mireau under the bus to secure his own advancement. (The slight tone of admiration and approval in Broulard's voice suggests that even the camaraderie of the officer class is based entirely on how well people play the game.) Dax viciously responds, and Broulard changes tone to one of pity and parental disappointment at Dax's idealism, utterly blind to his own culpability.

Kubrick tempers the messaging of these scenes with darker, ostensibly superfluous scenes that may contain the same direct dialogue but deepen the film for their extraneous development. Before the charge, a fast-talking soldier wakes up a buddy in a panic to get into a discussion about whether one would rather be killed by machine gun or bayonet. The comrade agrees the machine gun fire would be preferable because it is instant, leading to a chat on the difference between fear of pain and that of death and that soldiers really fear injury. An antipersonnel explosive is worse than nerve gas because the gas kills in seconds; a mine designed to maim instead of kill, draining national resources in terms of health care and sapping civilian support when some limbless freak gets foisted back onto his parents and spouse. The power of that scene downplays any romantic sentiment of death for glory: death is simply the quickest way to make the horror stop.

Low-key lighting adds a noirish touch to Paths of Glory, perhaps a lingering affect from Kubrick's work on The Killing but also a means to tie in this war film with the aesthetic and mindset of the more cynical, anti-authoritarian genre. Formal lighting places Dax in brighter profile while Mireau and Broulard are shadowed even when standing right next to Douglas, but the manner in which lighting can spin on a dime from the illuminated long shot of the château parlor to a darker medium shot in the same room instantly changes mood. James Jones, veteran and author of The Thin Red Line among other novels, panned the film for still adhering to enough conventions that, to him, it failed as an anti-war picture, but Paths of Glory goes out of its way never to glorify anything. One cannot even get a thrill of horror from the actual execution, as, after following the condemned in medium close-ups, he cuts to a long shot from the firing squad's POV as the drum roll ends and the faint chirping of a songbird can be heard. The command to fire breaks the terrible tranquility, and the bodies fall over without sound or accompaniment.


Of course, the most superfluous touch is also the film's greatest moment. Rather than end with the execution and Dax's rousing but pointless condemnation of the generals, Kubrick inserts a coda of the remaining men drinking and carousing in a tavern, unloading the pain of the battlefield and of what they just witnessed from their own command. A captured German woman (Kubrick's later wife, Christiane), beautiful and terrified, is brought in to sing for the men, who scream and hoot with rapacious savagery. When she begins to sing a German folk tune, however, the catcalling ceases, and the men realize suddenly that they are like her, trapped and forced to perform for those arbitrarily deemed "superior." Their hoots turn to hums and tears stream down men's faces as they do the girl's. It is one of the most powerful moments in the director's filmography, and therefore all of cinema, a complete deflation of whatever tinge of nationalistic pride that can make these men forget how little their lives are worth to those who send them to die.

The film at last ends with Dax returning to his quarters, the dolly that tracks to his door a reflection of the shot that followed him out of his bunker. The drum roll flourish also creates a reflective aural element, recalling the opening sounds. Not a damn thing has changed by the end of this movie: neither side has advanced, and the French Army has not solidified loyalty by killing its own. It is one of the bleakest endings put on screen, and as damning an indictment of war as has ever been made. Yet by embodying the remorseless remove of those who play chess with men's lives, Kubrick reveals the abhorrence of rationality and mathematical views of humanity. He would not display such outright humanism again until his swan song.

Brian De Palma: Home Movies

Considering the often-questionable acting prowess seen on the screen in Brian De Palma's movies, to say nothing of the borderline anarchy of his early work, accusations that the director had no idea what he was doing were understandable, if myopic. Of course, both of those traits were deliberate moves by a man both obsessed with the artifice of cinema and always on the lookout for a good joke, preferably at the expense of the audience.

Made during New Hollywood's implosion, this low-budget, 16mm comedy, filmed during De Palma's time as a guest lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College, looks on the surface like an attempt to return to the director's early mode of filmmaking, that hyper-political, Godardian slapstick. But it might also be the director's answer to those critics who charged De Palma with being an incompetent: if they thought he didn't understand film form before, just wait until they got a load of this.

Granted, that interpretation gives away my opinion of the film, not to mention suggests that De Palma intentionally made this to be a nearly unwatchable train wreck. But I cannot lie: he and his students, who coordinated with the director on the project, crafted one stiff comedy. While I do not hold most of the earliest films of De Palma in highest regard (with the exceptions of Hi, Mom! and Phantom of the Paradise), I find those early comedies funny precisely because the humor is as reflective of De Palma's deep knowledge and rejection of film form at the onset of his career as the direction itself. De Palma knew the rules before breaking them, and he appears to use the students to see what would happen if someone never bothered to learn the "proper" way to make a film. I think of this wonderful quote by bass virtuoso Victor Wooten: "If you take a newborn baby and put them on the instrument, they're going to get sounds out of it that I can't get out of it, so we're all the best." Perhaps by letting these people make the film they want before someone tells them how to do it, they can become the next generation of movers and shakers. And by limiting the budget, De Palma not only teaches others but himself how to be ingenuous in a time when budgets were starting to inflate beyond reason.

At the same time, Home Movies' central flaw is the uneasy tug-of-war between its more chaotic side and a loyalty to conventional comedy structure that makes what could have been free-form brilliance into a sloppy take on what looks suspiciously like an attempt to hitch wagons to the National Lampoon's contemporary success with teen comedies. Plus, the students at Sarah Lawrence had an advantage most film students do not: they got to make their movie with proven actors, either old character standbys from De Palma's films or some of his stars. Nancy Allen is a major character, and Kirk Douglas himself appears as "The Maestro," an obvious De Palma stand-in who instructs the classroom full of students working on the film.

Ostensibly the story of Dennis Byrd (Keith Gordon, essentially laying the framework for his career here as a shy, likable geek), a young man trapped in a highly dysfunctional family, Home Movies immediately throws the audience for a loop, playing the beginning of Byrd's story through the classroom as the Maestro lectures not only the class but the film crew he brings with him at all times. Dennis, pining for his brother's fiancée, Kristina (Nancy Allen), not only attempts to convince her that his domineering brother isn't the saint people inexplicably think he is but tries to uncover his surgeon father's infidelity. The Maestro occasionally intrudes upon Dennis' life, chastising the boy for sitting in a tree spying on his dad and making himself an extra in his own life instead of the star. He instructs Dennis to film his own life to ensure that he finally becomes the protagonist of his existence, meaning that Home Movies follows The Maestro and his class watching a movie of a young man's life as that man also films that life. It might be worthy of Charlie Kaufman if the execution wasn't so clumsy.

I do not like to guess a filmmaker's motives unless I am feeling particularly dismissive; it's all too easy to forgive or damn a film by building up a strawman of the director's intent and hanging interpretation off of a wild guess. With Home Movies, you can't even speculate on the construction: De Palma's themes and style are all over this movie, from the focus on film's artifice and voyeurism to the constant division within the frame by beams and lines, effectively creating homemade split-screen. And even with the 16mm stock, Home Movies does look cinematic. Does this mean the director edged aside his students to make entirely his movie? Or did De Palma, renowned for paying tribute (if not outright stealing) to the films he loves, encourage his students to spoof him?

Home Movies certainly has some of the feel of De Palm's early films, with such exaggerated madness as Dennis' mother stumbling in on Dennis making out with a woman, being reminded of her husband's own tomfoolery and subsequently faking her suicide by pill overdose (a sequence that ends in one of the few funny bits in the film as the doctor husband pumps her stomach). Elsewhere, Kristina appears to be possessed by a stuffed rabbit that brings out her id, making for yet more oddball comedy that is just too silly to work. Kristina's attempts to cure herself of her addictions, chiefly to fast food and sex, make for the funniest recurring joke of the film, but the joke eventually wears thin.

To be honest, the aspect of the film that made me laugh the hardest was how natural Keith Gordon was. Nearly everyone in all De Palma films up to this point has been deliberately exaggerated, but Gordon is one of the few to act like someone who just got told to make a film of his life. At long last, a performance people could praise, and it's in the one film that would have benefited from total wackiness.

Still, there are some things that work here. The comedy may be a dud, but the ideas behind Home Movies are intriguing, if infuriatingly unfocused. Dennis' brother, James (Gerrit Graham), teaches a course he calls "Spartanetics," a hypermasculine, young adult version of the Boy Scouts advancing the idea of male self-sufficiency. De Palma ruthlessly skewers this idiot, even as most of the characters in the film look up to him. Likewise, the Maestro's class, Explorations on Star Theory, encourages people to make themselves the matinee name in the film of their lives, but with manly man Douglas preaching the message, the course puts out a subtly patriarchal view. De Palma was on the cusp of a string of films that would earn accusations of misogyny at almost every turn, but the director is openly mocking of chauvinism here, and by filtering some of the masculinity through the Maestro and his brand of filmmaking, De Palma even spares an attack for the sexism inherent in cinema.

By titling the film Home Movies, De Palma suggests one of two things: that he loves the cinema so much that he would equate the act of helping students get their first hands-on experience at filmmaking with tapes of babies learning their first words or taking their first steps, or that, in making the film, he realizes that his early style of filmmaking is stuck in the past where he cannot return to it. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in-between. In an interview with Gerald Peary around the time of the film's release, De Palma explained his issue with film schools: "The real trouble with film school is that the people teaching are so far out of the industry that they don't give the students an idea of what's happening. Students should be exposed to the best people in the profession. If you study surgery, you study with the best doctors working in the hospital. You don't study with the ones who couldn't get a job." ¹ That's an interesting take, but also one that underlines how much of a vanity project Home Movies is, De Palma's excuse to use the clout he'd gathered up to hide from the mainstream for awhile just as he was starting to break into it. There's an air of sadness at the end because of this, as De Palma assembles the final cut and realizes he can never go back to what he used to be. If he could have seen the critical bloodbath that awaited him in the coming decade, Home Movies might well have been a full, Grecian tragedy.

¹Interview with Brian De Palma, by Gerald Peary. Originally published in Take One, January 1979.

Brian De Palma: The Fury

Though it never reaches the heights of De Palma's previous two features, The Fury combines the best aspects of both. It shares Obsession's convoluted plot and its brazen Romanticism, and it draws from Carrie's supernatural take on puberty. In a way, it resembles All the President's Men, if that movie were somehow turned into an X-Men comic.

Rarely have I seen a narrative more mangled and half-conceived, and never have I seen one that is so happy to point this out to the viewer. When the film opens on a coastal villa with the hilariously non-specific supertitle "Middle East," De Palma gives us fair warning that we'll never get the full details. In no time, the movie spirals into madness. Peter Sanza (Kirk Douglas, grayed but chiseled like a Greek god) lives a relaxed life with his young adult son, Robin (Andrew Stevens), who seems apprehensive about returning to the States after several years away. Vague mentions of some "gift" surface in their conversation, but the arrival of terrorists via dinghies interrupts the chat. In the middle of the firefight, Peter spots one of the supposed terrorists filming the shooting, and he lures attention and gunfire away by leaving Robin with his friend and associate, Childress (John Cassavetes), and grabbing a boat and heading out to sea. His plan takes a bit of a turn when the boat explodes.

This all happens in about seven minutes, mind you. It only gets crazier from here. Peter survives and discovers that Childress orchestrated the attack, sending the father into hiding so that he might reclaim his son and get revenge. Then, De Palma started piling on the craziness. Back in America, a young woman named Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving) is trying, unsuccessfully, to deal with a talent like Robin's. She's psychic as well as telekinetic, and this causes a surprising amount of mocking and dismissal from the other girls in her school even when she proves herself.

Were any other director behind The Fury, it could not possibly have worked. It's all too silly, and the film finds itself in the nebulous area between conviction and irony, aware that it is absurd but not playing on that knowledge. The greatest running gag of the film involves the normalcy with which it treats some of its craziest elements. Everyone at school knows Gillian is psychic, but they act like she's just trying to get attention. When representatives of the "Paragon Institute" come and test the children for psychic powers, the nurse sent never once lies about why she's there, and everyone accepts this without comment.

Then, there's Douglas' character. Peter is so obstinately unkillable and singularly focused that he becomes an open parody of the individualistic hero of the cinema. He's a master of disguise, an eloquent speaker, an expert driver, a marksman, a lethal close combatant and, finally, sex on legs. Propelled by Douglas' swagger, Peter looks like he could drink James Bond under a table and then screw whatever woman Bond had been seducing previously. At one point, someone asks Peter about Childress and asks if he's afraid of the man. "He's afraid of me," comes Peter's response, and who could blame Childress for his fear?

A comic element always existed in Douglas' rogues gallery of assholes, but he is downright hysterical in the first half of the film. When Childress tracks Peter to a hotel, the man escapes in his underwear, leaping onto raised train tracks and crashing into the apartment of a slovenly couple, complete with harridan mother-in-law. Peter holds them up but is so gentlemanly that the old woman gladly helps him tie up the younger pair and even cooks the beleaguered father breakfast while he creates an old man disguise for himself.

De Palma uses the considerable talents of his leading man to springboard into some of his most audacious and boldly comic filmmaking yet. One of the best sequences in De Palma's early canon comes in the form of a ludicrous car chase between Childress' men and two off-duty cops that Peter threatens. Bob, the cop driving, laments that he only just bought his car that afternoon, but Peter guides them through stop lights, heavy fog and a construction zone, destroying every follower and not getting a scratch on the Cadillac. The sequence is littered with visual gags and ingenious direction, but De Palma reveals it all to be a setup, the punchline of which is Peter ultimately taking the car and driving it off an unfinished bridge in front of poor Bob. Why does he destroy the man's Caddy? I can't say. What else are you supposed to do with a shiny, new vehicle in a comic thriller?

Peter's efforts to find and save his son mirror and invert the murderous rage that the father in Obsession feels for the woman he does not recognize as his daughter. He sleeps with a nurse, Hester (Carrie Snodgress), at the Paragon Institute so he might get information on Robin, who stayed there after Childress abducted the boy. Peter also attempts to take Gillian, who displays a power to rival Robin's, in order to track down his son. His single-minded focus is fearsome, and Douglas' performance is surprisingly powerful even as he, more than anyone else in the cast (save perhaps Cassavetes, made to fake a dead arm the entire time), understands that the film is a lark.

His dedication to the role marks the core of the film's more touching side. Gillian hates her powers and fears the lack of control she has over them. She befriends Hester, who cannot abide by the pressure placed on the children of the Paragon Institute and helps Gillian escape. When the nurse dies in the attempt, however, both Gillian and Peter are crushed. Compared to Bond, who can so casually use women in every way possible until he finally uses them as his own bulletproof vest, Peter looks at his lover's body and understands how his quest for vengeance has gone. After spending more than an hour hunting Gillian to use her, he immediately tries to release the young woman, unwilling to risk her for his suicide mission. It's inevitable that she will still come to the final showdown in the hopes of learning to control her powers through Robin, but the sudden halt in momentum for a man to pause his righteous crusade to spare the innocent reveals a side of De Palma that he won't fully reveal at this time. He's like a flasher walking around a park in naught but an overcoat, stalking up to youths and popping open his coat to reveal a beating heart.

The ending only compounds this romantic side, with Robin, experimented upon to the point of insanity, killing his assigned lover in a mad rage when he senses Gillian coming and fears he's being replaced. He even attacks his father, who endured so much just to see his son again, only for the boy to be so far gone that Peter possibly lets the boy fall to his death, aware that his own love cannot justify keeping such a monster alive. Peter's grief is all-consuming, however, and he leaps to die by his son, reunited at last. After laughing for an hour and a half, I found suddenly that the chuckles caught in the throat.

De Palma does spin the mood right 'round for the finale, which outdoes Scanners a few years before Cronenberg's film even existed, but it's too late. After peeking out from behind the hedges in Obsession, the director's Romanticism enjoys an entire act of open, unabashed visibility, and this revelation raises The Fury above its somewhat plodding middle section. The middle showcases the most of De Palma's tricks, particularly focused around his way of visualizing Gillian's psychic flashbacks, which allow us to essentially watch a second movie within the already-tangled narrative, but he cannot yet find the right balance between his softer side and his more impish impulses. Nevertheless, The Fury boasts one of the finest performances in De Palma's filmography, and after making his reputation on so many wild satires, the sudden emergence of some tangible emotion hints at the humanity that would inform his best films.

Ace in the Hole

By most accounts, Billy Wilder became a director not so much because he was interested in the visual craft of filmmaking but because he felt it the best way to ensure that what he wrote in his scripts would been seen in the final cut. Yet he's still earned himself a place in the pantheon of film directors, if for no other reason than he put Billy Wilder scripts on the big screen. Regardless, Wilder's visual talents, though certainly secondary to his calling as a writer, have been underrated by many; his style, as honed and sharp as his dialogue, serves the same purpose as illustrative passages in novels, to communicate setting and character in a way that speech cannot, complementing story and action with engaging prose.

Consider the first scene of Ace in the Hole, Wilder's disturbingly prescient look at media circuses. Chuck Tatum, disgraced big-city journalist, is stuck in New Mexico with a broken-down car. We see him being towed, a visualization of his uselessness and dilapidation, yet Tatum sits in his car lackadaisically reading his morning paper, having turned the ignominy of being unable to fix his vehicle into making the tow driver into some sort of chauffeur. Without a word, Wilder establishes the character who will subsequently walk into the office of the Albuquerque paper he was reading and proudly crow that he's a "$250-a-week newspaperman" and doesn't look a touch humbled when he offers to work for $50, even $45, as a result of his numerous firings for slander, alcoholism and other issues. Played by Kirk Douglas, Tatum exudes even more sleazy arrogance; Douglas is the reigning monarch of cinematic slime, capable of playing the noble hero (both of his films with Stanley Kubrick) but in his element playing, in his own words, "sons of bitches." He practically seeps manipulation and avarice, acting traits he somehow passed on to his son Michael, who may be the last great anti-hero.

Tatum plans to stay in Albuquerque just until he can latch onto a story to propel him back to the big leagues, at which point Wilder abruptly cuts to the cocksure journalist still stuck in town a year later. Riding out with an idealistic young photographer, Tatum still maintains his bravado but can scarcely contain the look of hunger when the two happen upon a small town where a man has become trapped in a local mine while excavating Native American relics. No one on the scene will enter the unstable cave, but Chuck immediately volunteers to enter. Upon finding the man, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), Tatum displays a heretofore unseen soft side, reassuring the trapped man and speaking in a higher register as if parodying the stereotypical "'50s voice" of the fresh-faced innocent. When Chuck suddenly brandishes a camera, however, he exposes his facade: he just wants this man for the story, and the smile he gives Leo is genuine, but it comes not from concern for the man but a vision of the attention his byline will receive when he starts writing about this jackpot.

Made in 1951, Ace in the Hole came out in a time when radio had set in motion a shift in newspaper writing, away from the yellow journalism wars that actually created real conflicts at the turn of the century: with radio and -- as the decade wore on -- television satisfying the demand for sensationalist news by providing sight and sound to items that always relied on dramatic thrust, papers refined their approach, sharpening writing to concise, factual bursts with just enough style to make sure people read the substance. More than ever, you could open up a paper and trust that you were reading a true story and an important one.

Into this world Wilder introduces Chuck, a 21st century muckraker having traveled back in time to wreak havoc upon the public trust. Upon reaching the Albuquerque paper, he looks at an embroidered cloth reading "Tell the Truth" hung over a desk with such mocking smugness it's a wonder he can even speak kindly of it sarcastically. He immediately turns Leo's situation into national news, aware that, if he can stretch the story into a human interest series, not only can he attract the attention of the major papers, he might put himself in for a Pulitzer. So, he commits what must surely be one of the most monstrous acts in cinematic history, one committed not by a lurking vampire or a mustache-twirling bandit but a man charged with informing the public: he strong-arms the engineer tasking with digging through to Leo to use a procedure that will take six days rather than a far quicker one that will have the man out and safe in six hours. Before you can even wrap your mind around the sheer, unabashed evil of that action, Chuck then coerces the seedy local sheriff (played by a deliciously greasy Ray Teal) into granting him exclusive access to Leo, thus giving him all the relevant stories. In one fell swoop, Wilder anticipates the sensationalist, gossip-driven media climate in which we find ourselves today, and he does not limit the attack to Chuck alone: when other reporters arrive and find themselves blocked by the authorities, their outrage seems to bubble forth from their jealousy that Chuck got there first. They don't give a damn about Leo, either, but they want their share of the circulation-increasing story. "We're all in the same boat," one journo coos to encourage Chuck to drop the blockade. "I'm in the boat," Chuck replies, "you're in the water."

Yet the most damning aspect of Wilder's misanthropy is how he prevents his story from playing as a mere screed. He does not make Tatum into a symbol so much as simply the eruption of dormant public desire for thrilling news. Critics at the time, who all would have been newspaper writers, lambasted the film for its cynicism, but would any of them deny that, if one didn't know what strings Chuck was pulling behind the scenes, that Leo's story is truly compelling? Would any one of them not read such a story -- the scenario of Leo being trapped was itself taken from the real story of one W. Floyd Collins, whose unfortunate mishap in a Kentucky cave in 1925 won writer William Burke Miller the Pulitzer -- and not be moved? No, Wilder undercuts Tatum's vile nature by making him a writer who knows what makes great news.

And boy does this story make for great news. After the first article runs in the paper, a few curious tourists show up, speaking of offering their concerns but also willing to spend money and gawk at the site. By the end of the week, thousands have converged upon the excavation site, and a literal carnival has sprung up to match the media circus. It has often been said (rightly) that gossip tabloids and the like only cater to a market fueled by public demand. If one paper refuses to engage in the current fascination with celebrity and tearing down celebrity, another five will shove their way into the gap and make money that papers can't afford to lose. We are all in this together, and when even the kind, innocent young photographer is drawn into the party atmosphere and crows that his photos might earn him a spread in Life of Look, Wilder goes far beyond any facile summary of his cynicism and into a terrifyingly realized realm that looks only more acute today.

If the shadows weren't a big giveaway -- and Wilder was one of the great masters of shadow -- that Ace in the Hole is as unorthodox yet bona fide noir as Sunset Boulevard, then the character of Leo's wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling), proves it. Chuck is a singular anti-hero in noir, and he requires an equally original femme fatale, but Lorraine delivers in spades. When Chuck heads over to meet her while working on his first story, the young bleached blonde reveals that she's planning to use the opportunity of her husband being trapped to leave him. Chuck convinces her to stay because he needs her looking supportive to sell what must end a happy tale for maximum effect with the readers, and he sways her by pointing out how much money she can make off the visitors.

Together, Tatum and Lorraine make for a despicable pair, each filled with as much loathing for the other as they are for everyone around them. Even Tatum marvels at Lorraine's open hatred for her humdrum husband and her desire to escape him for a more rowdy life, disgusted by her glee over the matter. She smiles like a schoolgirl telling him of all the cash she's taken in, and Tatum tells her to wipe the smile off her face before going back out to face a crowd that will notice her joy. To ensure she does, he slaps her twice with such unexpected force -- there is no pullback, and Wilder only shows Sterling's face as Douglas' hand moves back and forth across it, preventing us from reading his face and anticipating the strike -- that you feel it too. This pattern of abuse turns Lorraine against Tatum, and whatever trace of vulnerability, however perverse, existed in her is purged by the time she comes to him a few minutes later and quietly but forcefully tells the writer, "Don't ever slap me again."

Sterling forms a key foil to Douglas, matching the acrobatics of his over-the-top facial expressions with an endothermic scowl. She moves with an alien stiffness, playing the part of the shocked spouse until she gathers enough cash to satisfy her before leaving. Her sinister plotting anchors Douglas and enhances both performances because the actor is free to ham it up, to visualize the sheer madness of the public fascination with death and their belated wish for everything to turn out OK, while Sterling reveals that such behavior is not the product of people like Tatum but of her. People like her start the ball rolling with their non-expressive reactions, and it snowballs until someone like Chuck has to project of all of the pent-up emotion just to vent the collective schadenfreude and avarice of the public.

Naturally, one expects good writing from a Billy Wilder film, but this may be his leanest work. Entire characters can be defined in a single line, such as Tatum pointing out that the head of the Albuquerque paper wears both a belt and suspenders, signifying that he is overly cautious and wary. Later, Chuck encourages Lorraine to go to church to keep up appearances, but she replies, "I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." These cast-off bits of wry observation fit the tone of a film about journalism: concise but powerful, telling you everything you need to know in a few sentences. (Wilder, like nearly all the great film writers of the classic age, started out as a newspaperman himself.)

It's a miracle this film got made, even with the wild success of Sunset Blvd. essentially guaranteeing Wilder whatever project he wished to make. The Hays Code office intervened, of course, forcing the director to soften the corruption of the town sheriff, but this is one of those films where you're glad someone stepped in and made sure the bad guy got what was coming to him. Chuck Tatum could very well have gotten away with all this today, plagued by a small pocket of guilt he could drink away upon returning to New York. Instead, he bleeds out just after Leo finally dies, stabbed in the gut by Lorraine after abusing her one too many times. Having finally felt some pang of remorse for his actions, Chuck nevertheless is beyond forgiveness, and he dies a moral Antichrist, his death damning his profession for all time instead of pointing the way to salvation. As ever, Wilder saves the best for the very last, as Tatum staggers back into that local paper for one final moment of self-indulgent triumph. "I'm a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman," he gasps defiantly at Mr. Boot, "But you can have me for nothing." Then, this wretched beast finally collapses, falling down dead and staring at the camera into the audience who will cluck and rage over the movie then fulfill its dire vision. Billy Wilder was the master of endings, but none stick with you quite like this. And thank God; one such case is haunting enough.