Two films, 1951's Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole and 1957's Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd savagely criticized the growing power and scope of the media. Both, upon their release, predictably drew heavily negative reviews from the press. Movie critics took personal affront to the bile and spleen directed their way and formulated their responses accordingly. In part due to such bad reviews, they ended up being commercial flops, though Ace in the Hole was a tremendous success overseas, particularly in Europe. Part of the problem, too, was that cynicism that bleakly rendered into celluloid was simply repulsive to the Fifties attitude of renewed optimism particularly after having recently experienced the horror of The Great Depression and World War II. The American public would not be ready to entertain such subjects until the Seventies, and particularly not until after Watergate.
The film was based on two real-life stories, one of a man named Floyd Collins who, while spelunking found himself trapped by a landslide inside a Kentucky cave, and the other involving a three-year-old California girl named Kathy Fiscus who fell into an abandoned well. Both incidents drew much media attention. In this fictional circumstance, a New Mexico man named Leo Minosa is trapped by a cave-in while seeking to remove ancient Native American pottery from inside a burial ground. Despite the fact that such an action technically counts as desecration of a grave site, he is eager to make fifty dollars, which is what the pottery would fetch to an interested party. An opportunistic and amoral journalist, Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) devises a scheme to heavily publicize what on the surface would seem to be a relatively limited story. By stretching the truth and adding a sensationalist human interest angle to what would otherwise be straightforward matter, Tatum attracts the attention of thousands of interested people who arrive at the remote town of Escadero to gawk and be part of a literal Media Circus complete with carnival rides, vendors hawking food, and constant updates to a fascinated public by way of on-site radio broadcasts.
When the story catches fire, everyone who can use the event to their own financial advantage has no reservations in doing so. The most telling example of this kind of callous capitalism is the Ma and Pa America couple who are the first to arrive on the scene after the local papers print the story. Seemingly, one would think such people would be the bastions of morality and restraint. Before the throngs arrive, we, the audience are led to believe nothing to the contrary. However, after the literal Media Circus is established due to a combination of hype and deviously clever exaggeration, our prior assumptions are thrown aside. In horror, we view how this seemingly pious man emphasizes that he, not others claiming to the contrary was the first person to arrive on the scene, and then pivots neatly upon this claim by using his newly minted soapbox as a way to sell insurance to the assembled multitude. The circus swells and grows with every passing day, and with it arrive more and more people using the situation to make a buck, to increase their own power, or both.
Meanwhile, the Frankenstein monster which Tatum brought forth has become obsessed with monetary excess, at the expense, of course, of the man still trapped inside the cave. Tatum could have agreed that the man be rescued in a fraction of the time, even within a few hours. The original plan proposed by the engineer employed to aid in the rescue effort would have removed Minosa in a day, but Tatum insists that a more lengthy method be employed instead that will last nearly a week from start to finish. Obsessed with punching his ticket to a position at a larger paper back East, he is unwilling to waste a golden opportunity. Aware that building the tension of the story and infusing it with it a kind of desperate expectancy is the surest way to attract readership and build interest, Tatum's ambition and corresponding hubris are painful lessons for each of us. The hardest of hard truths in this film are that material gain and influence peddling can very easily supersede the facade of noble purpose, and that the potential demise of a human life can run a distant second place to selfish desires. In this day and age, such a message could not be more agonizingly topical and current.
In viewing Ace in the Hole today one recognizes that we have already arrived at an age where the media is a dangerous force in forming and fostering popular sentiment, and that unless its motives are examined closely, with this degree of power what can be created instead of an honest desire to unearth the truth is an orgy of cheap consumerism and amoral profiteering. These days the media seeks to justify its own existence by reacting indignantly to public criticism. Its constant refrain is that one ought not to shoot the messenger. That may be so, but if the messenger is the problem, then how can one not do so? Though the media might have been created to inform the public, it has taken significant liberties since then to interject itself and its own agenda to be indispensable for its own sake, not for the sake of the general public. In this New Media age, mainstream media criticism of the blogsophere which often scathingly condemns bloggers as being comprised of a rag-tag bunch of amateurs reacting irresponsibly to news events is little more than a fear of being usurped. One cannot stress overmuch how the mainstream media dips into blogs for news stories while also never feeling compelled to give credit or reimburse citizen journalists for the inspiration.