Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” is an adrenalin-shot of a comedy and a fearless dissection of identity politics, corporate malevolence, and the American tendency to look the other way when confronted with horror. In this brilliant satire, people gather around their TVs every night to watch a show called “I Got the Sh*t Kicked Out of Me” and embrace a new lifestyle called WorryFree, which is very clearly corporate slavery advertised as something good for you. There is so much to unpack here in a film that recalls Terry Gilliam, Michel Gondry, and Jonathan Swift, but it is basically the story of a man forced to finally see the injustice around him. Riley’s movie is designed to do the same thing to you. Pay attention.
Don’t worry. “Sorry to Bother You” is no message-heavy, standard social commentary flick. It is a hysterical comedy, one of the funniest movies of the year. Just as in the music he created with The Coup, the message never gets in the way of the rhythm. Riley’s film wants, first and foremost, to entertain you, and it almost certainly will do that, especially if you’re willing to go with it on a funky journey, no matter where it takes you.
The great Lakeith Stanfield does his best film work to date as Cassius “Cash” Green, a young man wondering, like so many, what he’s doing in life. Early in the film, we catch him talking with his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson, who simply makes everything she’s in better) about the common human dilemma when one considers the impact they’re making in the world. So many of us live check to check and struggle to stay alive much less make a difference. Cash wants to do something important. He will.
His life changes when he gets a horrible telemarketing job at a place called RegalView, a company that sells those relatively worthless encyclopedia books that some people have on their shelves but few people ever read. When he’s advised by a colleague (played by Danny Glover) to use his “white voice,” Cash starts to move up the corporate ladder quickly, eventually getting access to the golden elevator taken only by the “power callers.” The men and women who work on the top floor—where only the “white voice” is allowed—don’t sell books. They sell things people really shouldn’t be selling, and Cash is good at that too, drawing the attention of the maniacal Steve Lift (Armie Hammer) and the disgust of Detroit and his fellow co-workers, who have been struggling to unionize for worker’s rights.
There have been stories of men who sold their souls for success since people put pen to paper, but Riley loads his Faustian saga with enough social commentary to fill a dozen comedies. Every scene feels like it works on multiple registers. It’s much harder than it looks to make people laugh and think at the same time, and it’s that ingenious balance that makes Riley’s script for “Sorry to Bother You” so special. It never loses sight of its need to entertain along with the fact that it serves as a wake-up call for viewers to ask more questions about their priorities and those of people in power. It’s also cinematically striking, especially for a debut. From the fantastic costume design to the visual flights of fancy—such as when Cash and Detroit’s garage apartment literally transforms as Cash makes more money and a literal nod to Gondry in a corporate Claymation video—“Sorry to Bother You” has a confident visual language that so much comedy lacks.
Great satires don’t hold back, and Riley turns most of his choices up to 11. For example, he could have had Stanfield mimic a “white voice,” but he dubs Stanfield with another actor. From the beginning, he’s making clear that this is an exaggerated, insane world—a funhouse mirror version of our own that only film could provide. That riskiness leads to a final act of insanity that will lose some people—both times I’ve seen the movie you could sense part of the theater tuning out as the movie takes a turn into sci-fi. For me, I love it when a filmmaker doesn’t pull back from the edge, but goes right over it. So while that part of the film may be weaker than what came before, I still respect the willingness to go there.
You’ll see a lot of movies this summer that feel like the product of focus groups and marketing teams. Every frame and choice in “Sorry to Bother You” feels like the opposite—a pronouncement of a major new talent. I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Synopsis: Tamala 2010 Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space follows the hyperactive, non-sequitur adventures of Tamala, a little kitty with a spaceship. On her way to Orion, her ship is diverted to Planet Q, a place where dogs rule. Chased by a degenerate cop while evading society with the help of love interest Michelangelo, Tamala uncovers not only the secrets behind ‘Catty & Company’, the huge megaconglomerate that rules the Feline Galaxy, but also her own identity. That, and a whole lot of really weird stuff happens.
Review: The product of an artist group called Trees of Life (“t.o.L”), Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space is as strange a thing as you’ll ever see. Doubtlessly produced under the influence of past animated ‘head trips’ like The Beatles’ classic film Yellow Submarine, Tamala 2010 is, without a doubt, something that will only appeal to a very specific audience: art students and college kids strung out on illegal substances.
Tamala 2010 follows something of a storyline. Basically, we follow Tamala, a sort of Hello Kitty-alike who swears like a sailor and flies around in her retro spaceship. Engine trouble pops up, and she’s mistakenly rerouted to Planet Q, a place inhabited almost enitely by dogs. There’s a mild terrorism problem; dogs attack cats at random. Meeting up with a cat named Michelangelo, Tamala evades a perverted canine policeman and uncovers a whole load of mysteries and secrets surrounding Catty & Company, the gigantic corporation that controls nearly everything in the Feline Galaxy. That description, of course, makes the film sound fairly straightforward and simple, which is, unfortunately, not the case. The movie goes off on a series of hallucinogenic tangents that have almost nothing to do with the main storyline and will confuse anyone who isn’t paying strict attention. The irony is that the film seems to have been designed to make the viewer tune out, so paying strict attention might be missing the point.
Deciphering Tamala 2010’s message is fairly difficult. A single viewing of the film won’t reveal much of anything, except a warped sort of anti-capitalist message that doesn’t really assert itself due to the totally detached and apathetic main character. Catty & Company winds up being connected to a bizarre religious cult and supposedly has the ability to make and remake the universe in its own image; this all connects to Tamala, who doesn’t seem to really care about anything that’s happening around her. A visit to the t.o.L website reveals that the purpose of Tamala is to create a worldwide merchandising franchise, something that will basically do what Sanrio’s wretched saccharine creations have already done. Great. So what’s the point?
Well, for most people, the point is that this film is something to watch while stoned, created by artists who were also stoned. This conclusion is a little unfair; these days we have a tendency to attribute anything even slightly surreal or abstract to the abuse of narcotics, which undermines the entire concept of creativity. Tamala 2010, while certainly as tangential and nonsensical as your favorite addict’s acid trip stories, seems to be the concentrated effort of a group of artists to create something more than just entertainment. Whether or not they were successful is another matter entirely; if this really was an attempt at sparking a worldwide phenomenon, then why did they produce a cultish, R-rated animated movie with which to promote their concept? Only t.o.L really knows what the purpose of this film was, and we, as viewers, are asked simply to consume and draw our own conclusions.
Artistically, the film is unique. The characters are animated in a sort of Flash-like fashion, with smooth and simple movements. Vehicles and some backdrops are animated in 3-D; the result is a piece of pop art unlike anything else. The film is mostly in black and white, using color very sparingly. It’s hard to tell if the visual style of this film is intended to put across any sort of message; you just never know with films like this one. The soundtrack is a surprisingly pleasant trance mix, perfectly suited for the visuals. As an art piece, Tamala 2010 does not disappoint.
Basically, if you’re a film student, or an art student, you owe it to yourself to see this film at least once. It’s one of those cult events that any serious underground culture junkie will have seen. The artist group that created it seems strangely cultish, and it’s a wonder there isn’t more information out there regarding them and their project. Whatever conclusion you come to, Tamala 2010 is a unique experience, totally different from anything else available on the market today (aside from, you know, Cat Soup and Yellow Submarine).
Conventional wisdom has it that Gremlins 2: The Last Batch, Joe Dante’s follow up to his hit 1984 film Gremlins, is an inferior film. In truth, it’s just a very different film – same idea (the first half is pretty much a remake of the original) but with lots of new jokes, some stinging satire, fewer moments of childhood-scarring darkness (you’ll find no analogue for the father-in-the-chimney speech here) and a big city setting. The original will always be the “better” film by virtue of having come first, but that doesn’t mean that this madcap sequel can be so easily dismissed out of hand.
The Christmas setting of the original is largely abandoned, though Gremlins 2 seems to be set in the early half of December. In New York, slimy business tycoon Daniel Clamp (John Glover), a transparent pop at Donald Trump, already a figure of mockery 26 years before he became US president, has plans to redevelop Chinatown into a soulless shopping centre. The only hold out is Mr Wing (Keye Luke) who still lives behind his shop and who has Gizmo the mogwai (voiced by Howie Mandel) with him. When Wing dies, the shop is demolished and Gizmo ends up at Splice of Life, Inc., a genetic engineering lab in Clamp Tower. Elsewhere in the building, Billy Peltzer (Zach Halligan) and his fiancée Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates), who have located to the Big Apple from Kingston Falls, are working menial jobs for Clamp – he’s an underappreciated and bullied draftsman and designer, she’s a tour guide in the building. When Billy hears someone humming Gizmo’s distinctive song, he rescue the mogwai from the clutches of Dr Catheter (Christopher Lee) and his assistants Martin and Lewis (Don and Dan Stanton).
Inevitably, Gizmo gets wet, spawns dozens of offspring who eat after midnight and transform into a pack of ravening and very aggressive gremlins on the loose (“All they have to do is to eat three or four children and there’d be the most appalling publicity!” frets Catheter.) And so far as plot goes, that’s pretty much it. The rest of the film is one gremlin-based set piece after the other as the curious and ravenous creatures ingest samples from Catheter’s lab (“I could get you diseases – you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he offers) transforming into a winged creature, a femme fatale who takes a shine to Clamp’s head of security (Robert Picardo) and an urbane and articulate “brain gremlin” (voiced by Tony Randall).
To make up for the lack of a plot, Dante and his writer Charles S. Haas pack the film to the rafters with sight gags, cameos (composer Jerry Goldsmith, actors John Astin, Henry Gibson, Rick Ducommun, Bubba Smith and Hulk Hogan, and even Dante himself all turn up and Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph return as Kingston Falls residents the Futtermans) and in-jokes, most of them film related: Octaman (1971) is being broadcast on Clamp’s cable television network (the film also takes aim at Ted Turner), renamed The Octopus People; Catheter is seen carrying a pod suspiciously similar to that seen in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955); any number of Universal classic horrors are quoted; and it goes on and on and on.
Some might find the constant callbacks to the films that informed Dante’s childhood – and even ones he made – all a bit too much, but there’s plenty of other humour to enjoy, much of it of a scabrously satirical bent. Where the earlier film had poked fun at the clichés of small-town American in cinema, principally as imagined by Frank Capra and the film’s producer, Steven Spielberg, the sequel casts a jaundiced eye at big city living – ” this is some crazy city” notes a holidaying Futterman, though the gremlins seem to love it, staging a rousing production number around their rendition of New York, New York. 60s action films, particularly Die Hard (1988) and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), genetic engineering, our over-reliance on technology that frequently lets us down, the venality of corporate millionaires and even the film industry itself all come under satirical assault too and the film doesn’t really hold back.
The clever thing about the film is how it manages all this while still somehow being more playful than its predecessor. It feels as though the darker elements of Gremlins had been deliberately toned down to make it more suitable for a family audience, particularly the younger children who had found the first film too scary. It still has its moments – the gremlins covered in pulsating sacs as they prepare to reproduce is a strikingly nasty image – but overall, Dante adopts a lighter touch. Perhaps to reassure anyone still worried by the cartoon-like mayhem (the film begins with a Warner Bros. style cartoon), the film even breaks down at one point, damaged by the gremlins, prompting a moment of weird self-reflexiveness as an angry mother (Dante regular Belinda Balaski, who had also been in the first film) to complain to the cinema manager (Paul Bartel) that “this is worse than the first one!”
The cast tend to play second fiddle to the gremlins created by Rick Baker’s Cinovation Studio but Christopher Lee stands out in a role that requires him to disappear for great lengths, but which gives him plenty of splendid dialogue to savour – “oh splendid, this must be my malaria” he exclaims gleefully when taking delivery of some new samples. He seems to have had a ball on the film, enjoying both the experience of working alongside Baker’s manic creations and the exposure that a big budget – though not entirely successful – blockbuster brought him. It’s often easy to forget that he could do comedy rather well and the chance to deadpan his way through lines like ” I swear to God, young man, I will never hurt anything ever again. There are some things that man is not meant to splice” is one he grasps with real relish.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch is unapologetically unruly, Dante skating perilously close to self-indulgence at times (film critic Leonard Maltin, who had pasted the original film, gets attacked by vengeful gremlins on the set of his new television show, while brandishing a videocassette of Gremlins) but just reins it in in time. You don’t see mainstream Hollywood films as wild and manic as this being made any more.
Sadly, despite toning down the horror, the film didn’t perform anywhere near as well at the box office as the original (it opened on the same day in the States as Dick Tracy and couldn’t compete with all the star power that far lesser film was able to bring to bear). It put a stop to the Gremlins franchise and apart from a few fan films, it remained dormant for many years, despite Dante’s best efforts to get a third film off the ground. And then in mid-2022, a third film, referred to by Dante on social media as Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, seemed to be edging closer to production. Whether it gets made, and whether its as anarchic, silly and as much fun as Gremlins 2 will remain to be seen.
“Everybody dreams. Everybody travels, sometimes into countries where strange beauty, wisdom, adventure, love expects him.” These words, a tad floaty and dreamlike themselves, open 1947’s Dreams That Money Can Buy. “This is a story of dreams mixed with reality,” the narrator intones. He can say that again. Directed by Hans Richter, painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, “film-experimenter,” and energetic member of the Dada movement, the picture takes a storyline that seems mundanely realistic — impecunious poet finds apartment, then must figure out how to pay the rent — and bends it into all manner of surreal shapes. And I do, literally, mean surreal, since several of the scenes come from the minds of noted avant-garde and surrealist artists, including, besides Richter himself, painter and photographer Man Ray, conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, sculptor Alexander Calder, and painter-sculptor-filmmaker Fernand Léger.
Joe, the film’s protagonist, finds he has a sort of superpower: by looking into the eyes of another, he can see the contents of their mind. He promptly sets up a sort of consultation business where he examines the unconscious thoughts of a client: say, an unambitious banker whose wife lives “like a double-entry column: no virtues, no vices.” He then uses the abstract materials of their thoughts to come up with a self-contained, somewhat less abstract dream for them to dream: in the banker’s case, a dream called “Desire,” which takes the form of a short film by Dadaist painter-sculptor-graphic artist-poet Max Ernst. For Joe’s other, differently neurotic customers, Richter, Man Ray, Duchamp, Calder, and Léger come up with suitable formally and aesthetically distinct dreams. While all these artists imbue Dreams That Money Can Buy with their own inimitable sensibilities (or nonsense abilities, as the case may be), I feel as though certain modern filmmakers would have the time of their lives remaking it. Michel Gondry comes to mind.
I love a good, bad movie. Especially ones that aren’t trying to be bad. There’s something deeply enjoyable about a movie taking itself utterly seriously and being incredibly genuine with its material – especially when the results are probably not as objectively “good” as its creators might have intended. This is where Repo! The Genetic Opera enters. Repo! The Genetic Opera is a movie musical in the same vein as The Rocky Horror Picture Show – it’s a sci-fi musical made on a low budget that, in the years after its release, has found a cult following. And, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Repo! The Genetic Opera is just one of those films that have to be seen to be believed. It is all at once confusing, entertaining, delightful, baffling, and grotesque. It’s an experience to behold and it’s a film that I adore. (4 out of 5 wands.)
(NOTE: There are spoilers ahead.)
Repo! The Genetic Opera (written by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman) In the mid-21st century, an epidemic of organ failures leads to the rise of GeneCo., a company providing transplants at a great price. Those who miss their payments become targets of GeneCo. mercenaries, who repossess the organs. In a world of drug addiction and legalized murder, a sheltered youth (Alexa Vega) seeks a cure for her rare disease as well as information about her family’s mysterious history. Her questions are answered at “The Genetic Opera.”
Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (of Saw II-IV fame), Repo! The Genetic Opera is the story of Shilo (Alexa Vega), a young girl with a blood disease who finds herself at the center of a feud between Nathan (Anthony Stewart Head), her father and a secret Repo Man for GeneCo, and Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), the CEO of GeneCo (a company that specializes in organ replacements). It is a story about a young girl striving for freedom and seeking to find her place in the world. It is a story about corporate greed, feuding families, spoiled children, and drug-and-surgery addicts. And, most of all, it is an opera – but instead of traditional opera music, the score is comprised entirely of mid-2000’s-style rock music. And boy, do all of these elements make for a confused film.
The plot of Repo! is a royal mess. Rumor has it that about an hour of the film was cut from the original script, for one reason or another, and it shows. The plot, itself, is fairly simple but like any soap opera, the twists and turns in the personal relationships come quick and fast and it all becomes a bit hard to follow unless you’re paying extremely close attention. And, for the average moviegoer, Repo! is not the kind of film that will demand their rapt attention. You’re never entirely sure just what the film is trying to focus on – is it a story about Shilo’s quest for independence? Is it a story about Nathan’s failures as a father? Is it a familial drama between the Largo family? Essentially, the film is about all of those things and also none of them. The film’s first act simultaneously rushes through exposition while feeling like an endless pit of background information. There’s absolutely no sense of the passage of time throughout the film. The second act is so short that by the time the third act begins, you have no idea how the film is gonna manage to wrap up all of these plot threads by the end of its titular opera sequence. The film is the very definition of style over substance, prioritizing spectacle and shock value over any semblance of a coherent narrative. And that’s largely a reason why the film was panned upon its release.
However, Repo! the Genetic Opera is a delightful movie in spite of all of that. It’s a baffling film to sit through, but that’s part of its charm. Plus, nobody who is watching Repo! these days is watching it for its plot. People enjoy this film because of its solid score, its bizarre atmosphere, and its wickedly enjoyable performances. Terrance Zdunich and Darren Smith’s score is this strange blend of rock, opera, traditional musical theatre, and alternative music. It’s something that shouldn’t work – and yet, it does. It feels a bit like Rocky Horror Picture Show in its sheer audaciousness; the film was literally marketed as “not your grandparents’ opera.” Like an opera, the entirety of the film’s narrative is told through its music. Unlike an opera, many of Repo!’s songs stand on their own as memorable, well-written and performed songs. Sure, some of them are a bit too over-the-top and cringey and there’s a definite lack of stylistic cohesion, but many of the songs are absolute earworms that will be stuck in your head for days. “Zydrate Anatomy”, “Chase the Morning”, “Legal Assassin”, “Infected”, and “At the Opera Tonight” are great examples of the variety of musical styles found in the film. None of those songs sound alike, but all of them are great.
Equally eclectic is the array of talent gathered for Repo!’s cast. I have no idea how Bousman managed to convince some of these actors to do this movie but thank God he did. I mean, how many films can say they have the girl from Spy Kids, Giles from Buffy, Paris Hilton, and Sarah Brightman in their cast? Remarkably, everyone in this film does a great job – including Paris Hilton. Everyone is fully committed to their characters and the film’s silliness and it shows. It’s impressive how well relatively new actors like Terrance Zdunich, Paris Hilton, and Ogre do when sharing the screen with the likes of Sarah Brightman, Anthony Stewart Head, and Paul Sorvino. Everyone in the film is perfectly cast and they are all bringing their A-games. Obvious standouts include Zdunich, Paul Sorvino, Anthony Head, Sarah Brightman, and Alexa Vega, but there is truly not a weak member of this cast. Half of the fun of Repo! is its music, and the way the narrative is told through it, and half of the fun is found in the film’s eclectic cast.
At the end of the day, Repo! The Genetic Opera is simply one of those films you have to experience. The plot makes no sense, but the visuals are seeped in this gothic-yet-futuristic atmosphere that draws you into the world in spite of the baffling plot. It looks and feels cheap, but that never stops any part of the film from reaching for the stars. The songs are catchy, memorable, and serve the narrative as well as you could hope for given the constraints of the film. The performances are strong and, fitting with the film’s overall tone of insanity, absolutely bonkers. The fact that this film manages to work at all is a testament to all who worked on it. So many elements of this movie just shouldn’t work – and, to be fair, many of them don’t. But much of the film does work, and it’s held together by this glue of passion and genuine respect for what’s trying to be accomplished. Repo! The Genetic Opera is a memorable experience not because it’s a terrible film but because it’s a seriously good one if you’re willing to meet it where it is.
What a thoughtful film this is, and how thought-stirring. Marc Forster‘s “Stranger Than Fiction” comes advertised as a romance, a comedy, a fantasy, and it is a little of all three, but it’s really a fable, a “moral tale” like Eric Rohmer tells.
Will Ferrell stars, in another role showing that like Steve Martin and Robin Williams he has dramatic gifts to equal his comedic talent. He plays IRS agent Harold Crick, who for years has led a sedate and ordered life. He lives in an apartment that looks like it was furnished on a 15-minute visit to Crate and Barrel. His wristwatch eventually tires of this existence and mystically decides to shake things up.
Harold begins to hear a voice in his head, one that is describing his own life — not in advance, but as a narrative that has just happened. He seeks counsel from a shrink (Linda Hunt) and convinced he is hearing his own life narrative, seeks counsel from Jules Hilbert, a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman). Hilbert methodically checks off genres and archetypes and comes up with a list of living authors who could plausibly be writing the “narration.” He misses, however, Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), because he decides Harold’s story is a comedy, and all of her novels end in death. However, Eiffel is indeed writing the story of Harold’s life. What Hilbert failed to foresee is that it ends in Harold’s death. And that is the engine for the moral tale.
Meanwhile, an astonishing thing happens. Harold goes to audit the tax return of Ana Pascal, a sprightly, tattooed bakery shop owner (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and begins to think about her. Can’t stop thinking. Love has never earlier played a role in his life. Nor does she much approve of IRS accountants. How rare, to find a pensive film about the responsibilities we have to art. If Kay Eiffel’s novel would be a masterpiece with Harold’s death, does he have a right to live? On the other hand, does she have the right to kill him for her work? “You have to die. It’s a masterpiece.” But life was just getting interesting for Harold. The shy, tentative way his relationship with Ana develops is quirky and sideways and well-suited to Gyllenhaal’s delicate way of kidding a role. He doesn’t want to die. On the other hand, after years of dutifully following authority, he is uncertain of his duty — and he is so meekly nice, he hates to disappoint Eíffel. Harold himself has never done anything so grand as write a masterpiece. Although the obvious cross-reference here is a self-referential Charlie Kaufman screenplay like “Adaptation,” I was reminded of another possible parallel, Melville’s famous short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” made into the 2001 movie with Crispin Glover and David Paymer. Bartleby is an office drudge who one day simply turns down a request from his boss, saying, “I would prefer not to.” Harold Crick, like Bartleby, labors in a vast office shuffling papers that mean nothing to him, and one day he begins a series of gentle but implacable decisions. Harold would prefer not to audit any more tax returns. And he would prefer not to die. But he is such a gentle and good soul that this second decision requires a lot of soul-searching, and it’s fascinating to watch how Hilbert and Ana participate indirectly in it, not least through some very good cookies. And what is Eiffel’s preference when she finds what power she has? Her publisher has assigned her an “assistant” (Queen Latifah) to force her through her writer’s block, so there is pressure there, too. She chain-smokes and considers suicide.
The director, Marc Forster, whose work includes the somber (“Monster’s Ball“) and the fantastical (“Finding Neverland“), here splits the difference. He shoots in a never-identified Chicago, often choosing spare and cold Mies van der Rohe buildings, and he adds quirky little graphics that show how Harold compulsively counts and sees spatial relationships. His work with the actors seeks a low-key earnestness, and Ferrell becomes a puzzled but hopeful seeker after the right thing. Gyllenhaal and Hoffman never push him too hard. And I like the dry detachment with which both Hoffman and Thompson consider literature, which is conceived in such passion and received with such academic reserve. Alas, Forster never finds the right note for Latifah’s character, who may not be necessary.
“Stranger Than Fiction” is a meditation on life, art and romance, and on the kinds of responsibility we have. Such an uncommonly intelligent film does not often get made. It could have pumped up its emotion to blockbuster level, but that would be false to the premise, which requires us to enter the lives of these specific quiet, sweet, worthy people. The ending is a compromise — but it isn’t the movie’s compromise, it belongs entirely to the characters and is their decision. And that made me smile.
An embroidered sign on the wall of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin reads, “Tell the Truth.” The paper’s managing editor, the moral and idealistic journalist Jacob Boot, hung it there “as a sign of his and the newspaper’s guiding ethic.” But ethics are something reporter Chuck Tatum has done without, which, along with his drinking (“Not a lot, just frequently”), earned him the sack from several daily papers on the east coast. Now relegated to hungrily petitioning for a job at a small New Mexico paper, Tatum tells Boot, “I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I go out and bite a dog to create some.” To be sure, the Sun-Bulletin’s guiding ethic is something of a joke to Tatum, and to filmmaker Billy Wilder, who layered Ace in the Hole with caustic pessimism toward the insincerity of American culture and the media’s failed capacity for truth. It would be one of Wilder’s most personal films, having written, produced, and directed the film with less studio meddling than he had ever experienced. But in 1951, Wilder’s picture debuted and vanished without a trace in one swift motion, disregarded by critics and audiences as the director’s most sneering demonstration of his worldly cynicism. Today, Ace in the Hole represents an artistic zenith in Wilder’s career, where his skill as a filmmaker and thorough condemnation of the human race converge into biting social commentary that stands apart from his more commonly known hits.
Along with many other directors of his day, Wilder (Jewish, and of Austrian-Hungarian descent) fled Adolf Hitler’s looming rein over Europe in the late 1930s. Wilder left Paris for the United States and, given his experience in the European motion picture industry, landed work as a Hollywood screenwriter. For the better part of his early career, he collaborated with his writing partner Charles Brackett on a number of popular films. Their early hits include Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939) and the Howard Hawks screwball comedy Ball of Fire (1941). He soon petitioned Paramount Pictures to allow him to write and direct his own film exclusively and, based on the impressive successes of Hollywood’s first comedic writer-director Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels), Wilder was given his chance. While German filmmakers were best known for their blatant expressionism, Wilder surprised Paramount studio heads in 1942 when his blithe and commercial debut The Major and the Minor turned out to be a box-office triumph. It was completely devoid of any unmarketable German-ness so well known in Hollywood from directors like Fritz Lang, as Wilder intentionally set out to make a commercial crowd-pleaser—if only to prove to studio heads that his films could earn a profit and connect with audiences so that later he could branch out.
Established as a bankable success, Wilder would go on to helm several benchmark pictures, many of them blending unconventional material with commercial appeal. Double Indemnity (1944), about a femme fatale who convinces her insurance agent to kill her husband, became an archetypal noir story; The Long Weekend (1945) was about an alcoholic on a serious bender and won the Oscar for Best Picture and Wilder a statue for Best Director; and Sunset Boulevard (1950) reflected Hollywood in a morbid, dark light, but also earned several Oscars and an immovable place in film history. In fact, many of Wilder’s films earned such a place. Though, Wilder remained best known for later comedies and romances like Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Love in the Afternoon (1957), Some Like it Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), and Irma La Douce (1963). Each winks to the audience by testing the boundaries of orthodoxy. A Foreign Affair (1948), for example, is somehow a romantic comedy, despite its setting in the otherwise humorless postwar Berlin. His movies were best known for their irony and unconventional settings, for their light lampooning and harsh criticism of established norms. Wilder was an incredible dramatist, a superb romantic, but foremost a satirist. Among them all, Ace in the Hole’s rebellious and unrelenting pessimism prove alarming when compared to the filmmaker’s more popularized string of successes.
Development on Ace in the Hole began just after Wilder finished work on Sunset Boulevard and separated from his longtime writing partner Charles Brackett. In his search for a replacement writing partner, he found Walter Newman, a 23-year-old writer of radio plays. Newman suggested they adapt a real-life event: On January 30, 1925, cave explorer W. Floyd Collins was trapped in Sand Cave in Kentucky when a landslide pinned him down. Learning of this, William Burke Miller, a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, crawled through a narrow opening to interview Collins. Miller’s story made national headlines. Local crowds and tourists gathered to watch the rescue efforts; businesses came to provide the crowds with distractions during their considerable downtime. Vendors sold hot dogs and a record huckster even wrote a song for country singer Vernon Dalhart. It later sold 3 million copies. Before long, the sheer number of people and vendors equated to a county fair or carnival, all of them forgetting that there was a man trapped and dying nearby. Collins was trapped for eighteen days before he died. Miller won a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his reporting. For Wilder, the story was not surprising. He worked for a scandal sheet in the 1920s while in Berlin. “I was doing the dirty work of crime reporting… Some of this I remembered for Ace in the Hole.” In one of Wilder’s anecdotes about his time as a reporter, he recalled being assigned to interview the parents of a murder victim and parents of a murderer. He admitted to making up the answers to the questions for the murderer’s parents; he couldn’t bring himself to face them. Wilder knew other journalists went to similarly subjective lengths.
A scarring indictment of journalism and, by extension, American culture, was just the sort of project he wanted to make as his first effort away from Brackett. Along with Newman, Wilder also invited the contracted Paramount writer Lesser Samuels, a former newspaper man, to join in telling a story that bore similarities to Collins’ fate. Their then-titled treatment “The Human Interest Story” was greenlit by Paramount with a budget of $1.5 million, $250,000 of which went to Wilder. Nonetheless, many in Hollywood doubted the project and held misgivings about what Wilder would produce without Brackett. Many felt that Brackett helped rationalize and tone down Wilder’s otherwise virulent cynicism. Aware of how he was seen throughout the industry, Wilder nonetheless continued to explore the most cynical film of his career. To protect himself and his next film, Wilder kept its subject matter under tight wraps. He handwrote a note on the first draft saying, “Do not give out under any circumstances—to anyone!” Had even the basic story leaked, not only would his detractors have ammunition with which to accuse him of rampant cynicism, but the press would certainly not be in favor of a film that sets out to lambaste the media. Meanwhile, Wilder signed Kirk Douglas to play the film’s resident William Burke Miller, here named Chuck Tatum—a deceitful reporter who creates the news with his own braggadocio and slick maneuvering. To prepare for Douglas for the role, Wilder sent him to work at the Herald Examiner as a novice reporter for a week.
Principal photography began on July 10, 1950, and wrapped on September 11, with the screenplay having been completed just four days earlier. Censor Joseph Breen had a few complaints about the lack of “a proper voice for morality,” citing the generally disparaging tone of the piece; however, because the protagonist’s utter lack of scruples result in him paying for his nihilism with his life, Breen had few demands for changes. Breen insisted on a single change in which the corrupt sheriff, Gus Kretzer (Ray Teal), whose role in the film’s central scandal goes unpunished, receives some manner of comeuppance. Wilder conceded and, in the end, he resolved to add a line about the newspaper’s editor Jacob Boot (Porter Hall) writing an exposé on the sheriff’s wrongdoings. For the visual presentation, Wilder and cinematographer Charles Lang wanted an authentic look far removed from many of then-current directors of photography. Wilder admired cinematographers who weren’t “working for the goddamned Academy Award”—who didn’t use “fancy camerawork, with the camera hanging off the chandelier.” Lang’s work is gritty and real, with brief touches of high-contrast shadows and noirish influence. Critic Manny Farber described Lang’s work on Ace in the Hole as having “a chilling documentary exactness.” On the periphery, Victor Desney, an actor who had approached Wilder about adapting Collins’ story two years earlier, learned about the production at Paramount and filed a lawsuit. Though Wilder and his writers changed the names and locations for the script and initially won their case, an appeal filed in the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of Desney. Wilder and his lawyers settled privately for a hearty sum.
Journalist William Burke Miller’s moral bankruptcy was surely exaggerated by the film, as Tatum’s Machiavellian cunning and self-centered portrayal is given intense bravado by Douglas. Tatum is a charismatic, ambitious, megalomaniac personality, yet filled with self-contempt. The story begins with Tatum, a hard-luck newspaper writer who talks loud, thinks fast, and belongs somewhere in a city scouring slums and politicians’ bedrooms for a story. Nevertheless, no city will have him. He’s been fired from eleven newspapers around the country for reasons ranging from drinking on the job to sleeping with the editor’s wife. His former salaries were more than anyone in the “sun-baked Siberia” of Albuquerque, where he finds himself when the film begins, has ever come close to earning. Casing the offices of the local paper, Tatum speaks with as much modesty as you will see from him—he tells the owner that taking him on will make the paper $200 a week, as he is a $250 writer willing to take the job for $50. Once hired, even a year later, Tatum still lights matches off typewriter recoils, scoffs at the paper’s embroidered “Tell the Truth” motto, and talks of his New York City glory days as if there were still a chance for him. All the while, he waits for a Big Fish to come along, onto which he hopes to snag his hook and pull himself out of his dinky Albuquerque boat, into the river and down all the way to New York City once again.
Beginning to feel that biding his time in New Mexico’s empty pasture of newspaper journalism might be his last mistake, Tatum sees a way back into The Big Time when driving to a rattlesnake festival (“Even for Albuquerque this is pretty Albuquerque,” Tatum remarks). By chance, Tatum and his gopher photographer stop at a wayside trading post and restaurant; they learn the store’s owner is trapped inside a centuries-old Native American cave system while digging for artifacts to sell. Remembering a journalist who years ago won a Pulitzer for dragging out such a story to its full dramatic scope (likely an in-film reference to Miller), Tatum sees the predicament of Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), the pleasant store owner and war vet who remains trapped in a tiny opening, as the perfect opportunity. Tatum explains, “Bad news sells best. ‘Cause good news is no news.” As with other Wilder protagonists, Tatum takes the low road to raise himself up, selling himself for the concept of personal accomplishment, not yet realizing the consequences until he ends up dead—a reoccurring theme in Wilder’s films since Double Indemnity. Tatum takes control of the rescue operation, out-talking even the local police; he bribes Sheriff Kretzer with the idea of reelection and fame from newspaper coverage. A contractor familiar with cave rescues wants to fasten the unstable walls with bearings, which should allow Minosa’s rescue in half a day. Too dangerous, Tatum explains. He suggests using a drill and going in through the top of the mountain—a decision that will extend Tatum’s newspaper treatment by days, allowing him to gain the attention of New York City’s high-brow journalists.
Tatum’s coverage attracts local attention. Tourists stop by just to get a look at the cave where “hero” Leo Minosa remains trapped. And then there’s Minosa’s wife, Lorraine, played by the appropriately desperate and tired-looking Jan Sterling. She seems none-too-broken up about her husband’s predicament—she uses Leo’s absence to try and leave him, until Tatum convinces her to stay for the event’s profits. After all, the crowds at the spectacle buy burgers at the Minosa trading post, giving Lorraine more business than they’ve had in, well, ever. (“We sell a case of soda pop a week, and once in a while a Navajo rug,” she admits.) Eventually, Lorraine comes on to Tatum, hoping that he can whisk her away from her isolation, off to The Big City. Through a few subtle glances, we realize Lorraine knows just what Tatum is up to. “That’s the first grand I’ve ever had,” she says to him after a good day of business, smiling with sexual conviction. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” Tatum instructs her to get that smile off her face, that she has the part of a distraught wife to play. “Why don’t you make me?” she says. Tatum slaps her hard across each cheek and her smile is replaced with angry confusion. “Don’t wipe those tears,” he says. “That’s the way you’re supposed to look.” It is a vicious, scary moment in the film, one where we realize how cruel and manipulative Tatum truly is, and how breathtaking an actor Douglas could be.
Compare Douglas’ Tatum to his character Jim McLeod in William Wyler’s Detective Story, released the same year as Ace in the Hole. Both characters are driven, self-aware, and conscious of their own moral downfalls. McLeod resorts to criminality to put criminals away; Tatum creates his own stories for journalistic purposes. Douglas excels in these roles, both powerful, flawed men. Their brash sensibilities are subdued only by Douglas’ natural, charming confidence. And while each character may be anti-heroic, to the point where we know they must die in the end to amend their misdeeds, we root for them, as they are uniquely sympathetic and convincing in their passions. By the time the drill is set up on top of the mountain, Lorraine is selling tickets to her husband’s imprisonment in the cave, even letting the circus erect tents, sell concessions, and sing songs about rescuing Leo—giving a very literal meaning to “media circus”. Wilder commissioned Paramount’s songwriting team of Jay Livingson and Ray Evans to write “We’re Coming, Leo”, a song to commemorate the cave-in, instructing them to write “the worst song you can, with bad rhymes and everything else bad.” A woman in a cowgirl getup sells copies of the song to spectators. Parents buy Indian headdresses for their children. Servers carry orders of food through the crowd. The throng’s blithe and entertained. A billboard claims the “proceeds go to the Leo Minosa Rescue Fund,” but undoubtedly, no one but the vendors will see a dollar. Wilder’s critique of postwar America is unremitting.
Flourishing under such conditions, Tatum juggles prearranging a job contract with a New York newspaper, keeping quiet those who know his secrets, communicating with Leo and instilling in him hope, and maintaining order in the newly constructed “community” just outside the cave. Wilder captures the cynical nature of the truth and media by exploring the reporter, his victims, and those who allow his plan to progress. His ending leaves both Leo and Tatum dead. “I’m a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman,” Tatum tells his idealistic Albuquerque editor. “You can have me for nothing.” Tatum falls to the ground, lifeless from a stab wound incurred by the rejected Lorraine. The final shot is Wilder’s only bravado shot in the picture, with Douglas dropped to within an inch of the camera’s lens. After all his efforts, Tatum could not assure than Minosa would live the week needed to once again boost his name. And yet, in the end, Tatum is not just a remorseless journalist; he’s riddled with guilt, but not enough to end his coldhearted behavior. Leo dies needlessly in the cave off-screen, believing Tatum is his friend to the last moment. Lorraine is left pathetically clinging to her profits. When the circus finds out Leo is dead, collective heads drop in sadness; within moments the makeshift parking lot is abandoned and only scattered garbage remains. Tatum failed to secure a much needed happy ending to his human interest story; had Leo survived, perhaps Tatum would have lived in the end. But that would be another film entirely.
As with so much modern media, Tatum decides what his readers know and where the story goes. He reports on and develops his yarn in the manner to which he desires. Television and newspaper journalists choose what they report, and more often than not it’s the type of news their audience wants to hear. This is a subjective, sensationalist process, guided by money and ratings as opposed the ideal objectivity professional journalists have forever yearned for but rarely achieve. Tatum takes subjectivity to the next level: interaction. While Ace in the Hole may seem satirical with Tatum pulling the locals’ strings like a puppeteer, reconsider the film’s basis in fact, that such events actually occurred to an extent. In some instances, they still occur today. In 1998, Steven Glass was famously fired from The New Republic magazine for fabricating entire stories. Names, places, events—all made-up. This is, of course, the next extension beyond what Tatum does in the film. And luckily, no one died from Glass’ actions; moreover, since there is no law against bad journalism, Glass was never punished. Fortunately, cinema can provide a cathartic, poetic justice. Like any great film noir, the criminal hero, Tatum in this case, is punished in the end for his wrongdoings, a narrative archetype that Wilder all but established with Double Indemnity. Though Ace in the Hole is not, for the most part, shot in the visually expressionist noir style, its plot conforms to traditional noirish devices—complete with an equally corrupt blonde bombshell to parallel the anti-hero. Only in the final scene, as Tatum collapses to the ground do we see Wilder’s noir intent. Douglas’ visage is barely lit but for a highlighted cheekbone and lower eyelid, so near we cannot help but confront the reality of Tatum’s death.
Perhaps this film’s cynicism explains its abortive performance in America, where critics found Wilder’s pessimistic attitude toward the unlikely chances of credible journalism offensive, and audiences altogether ignored it. Furthermore, the film illustrates general human corruption, since most of the film’s characters, save for Leo and Booth, are bought by Tatum’s charm. Curious that Paramount allowed such a powerfully overcast film to be made, or even believed audiences in 1951 were willing to endure such material. Even today, Ace in the Hole shocks for its blatant display of corruption otherwise commonplace amorality. The comparatively raw audiences of 1951 were not used to seeing such barefaced gloom and hopelessness depicted onscreen, unless film noir was their genre. While earning accolades in Europe, the picture was all but forgotten shortly thereafter. Poor receipts in North America panicked Paramount executives, who changed the title to “The Big Parade” briefly—a change that did little to increase attention to this sour-flavored picture. In Europe, which at the time was blossoming with some of the best in filmic auteurism, and which had no qualms about a film scorning American journalism and culture, Ace in the Hole was widely regarded as a masterpiece. When asked if Ace in the Hole was a cynical film, I. A. L. Diamond, Wilder’s co-writer on Some Like it Hot, said, “Sure they called it cynical. And then you see thousands and thousands of people turning up at Idlewald airport in New York to watch a plane coming down with bad landing gear. People clog the runway waiting for it to crash—and you ask yourself how cynical Ace in the Hole really was.”
In the wake of the film’s failure, Wilder’s break with Brackett was also blamed. Wilder resolved never to work with either Newman or Samuels again, not that the studio would back another collaboration between them after Ace in the Hole‘s failure. And because Paramount’s next Wilder movie, Stalag 17 (1953), was a huge success both commercially and artistically, Wilder’s salary for that film was purportedly withheld by Paramount to make up for the studio’s massive losses. “Fuck them all,” Wilder said of Ace of the Hole‘s critics. “It is the best picture I ever made!” Not long after the film’s release and its scathing reviews, Wilder witnessed a car accident in which a man was run over right in front of him. As Wilder got out of his car to check on the victim, a newspaper cameraman took a picture of the scene. Wilder told the cameraman to call an ambulance, but he replied, “I’ve got to get to the Los Angeles Times. I’ve got a picture that I’ve got to deliver.” Wilder said, “You put that in a movie, the critics think you’re exaggerating.” While Ace in the Hole was described as being from the “rattlesnake’s view of the world” by critics, today the ethical injustices committed by contemporary journalists far exceed those of Chuck Tatum. Years later, the film was almost universally forgotten, seen only occasionally on television. In 2002, the AFI declared it an overlooked masterpiece and held a special screening hosted by Neil LaBute. Five years later, New York’s Film Forum showcased the film with a newly restored print. Film historians around the world have since praised it with a newfound adoration and appreciation for the director’s purest voice.
Sayings like “ahead of its time” or “forward-thinking” do Ace in the Hole little justice. The film captured the lowest depths of 1950s journalistic misconduct, but also reflected the wasteland that Wilder believed American culture to be with supreme viciousness. Sensationalism and subjective reporting—amid contemporary saturation via social media, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and even cinema—have become more commonplace and monstrously unrestrained today than perhaps even Wilder could have imagined them becoming. Then again, the mutation of the media and our ever-increasing obsession with spectatorship would have disgusted Wilder, but they wouldn’t have surprised him. Lost to time and further eclipsed by the director’s landmark productivity after its release, Ace in the Hole’s cutting-edge criticism of journalistic integrity, or lack thereof, presents one of the most scathing samples from Wilder’s career of hard-biting satires and comic romances. Wilder saw Tatum’s unfeeling opportunism as a small sampling of what’s wrong with our culture. His censure of the media extends further to a vicious condemnation of American culture, specifically those who remain drawn to sensationalism regardless of who is harmed for their entertainment.
Bibliography:
Hopp, Glen. Billy Wilder: The Complete Films, The Cinema of Wit. Taschen, 2003.
Horton, Robert (editor). Billy Wilder: Interviews. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001.
McNally, Karen (editor). Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker: Critical Essays on the Films. McFarland, 2010.
Phillips, Gene D. Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder. University Press of Kentucky, 2009.
Sikov, Ed. On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. New York: Hyperion, 1998.
After the Crash 