I just finished watching Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, with
Kirk Douglas as Charles Tatum, an utterly unscrupulous
reporter Charles Tatum. While it's not a crime movie, it
certainly is a noir movie, with a main character who sets
about engineering his own destruction right from the start.
Douglas was good, if a bit over the top, and the movie did an
excellent job of capturing a literal media circus. I think
one of the criteria for a work of art to be great is that it
has to hold up over time. If anything, I think Ace in the
Hole's story is more relevant now in our media besotted
culture than it was when it was made, and newspapers, radio
and television were all there were. All in all a very good
film.
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