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Ace in the Hole
(AKA The Big Carnival)

Screening on Film
Directed by Billy Wilder.
With Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Robert Arthur.
US, 1951, 35mm, black & white, 111 min.

Wilder drew on his past experience as a reporter in Vienna to inform one of his darkest works. Kirk Douglas stars as a cynical journalist from New York City who takes a lesser job for a newspaper in Albuquerque. He stumbles upon a man trapped in a mine and proceeds to exploit this hard-luck, human interest story to get front-page headlines.  Wilder’s first work as a producer skewers the sensationalist drives of the media and reflects his desire to create work with greater moral complexity than was possible in the studio system.

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