Cinema: The New Pictures, Jul. 9, 1951

Ace in the Hole (Paramount), Producer-Director Billy Wilder’s first movie since Sunset Boulevard, gleefully dissects human beings at their worst. The picture is clever, original, technically expert, and carries an occasional sharp sting of truth. But it runs a good idea into the ground and leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

The story’s Wilder-style “hero” is an unscrupulous reporter (Kirk Douglas) who has been broken from big-city dailies to a job covering the humdrum local news of Albuquerque. Hungering for a break that will send him back to the big time, he stumbles on a disaster reminiscent of the Floyd Collins story of 1925: a cave-in has pinned Leo Minosa, owner of a roadside curio shop, deep in a nearby labyrinth of ancient Indian cliff dwellings.

By shoring up the crumbling passageways, a rescue party could get him out in a matter of hours. But Reporter Douglas, taking command of the rescue operations, wants the story—and Leo’s suffering—to stretch out for at least a week. Douglas gets his way by appealing to the worst instincts of two other crooks: a vicious sheriff (Ray Teal), who welcomes publicity for his electioneering, and Minosa’s unloving wife (well played by Jan Sterling), who is all set to desert her husband until Reporter Douglas shows her how to make a fast buck by sticking around.

Producer-Director Wilder, who collaborated on the script, brutalizes these heels fully as much as the conventional Hollywood movie sentimentalizes its characters.

But he reserves his greatest contempt, and his most telling scenes, for the kind of people who he presumably hopes will come to see his movie—the packs of ordinary citizens who crowd by car, bus and train to the arid site of Minosa’s entombment and settle down cheerfully in tents and trailers for a morbid spectators’ holiday. With them come radio and TV showmen and a neon-lighted traveling carnival, with Ferris wheel, pitchmen, hamburger stands and a hillbilly band bawling a specially concocted ballad, We’re Coming, Leo.*

For all its razzle-dazzle, Ace in the Hole is dogged almost from the beginning by its incredible central character, extravagantly overplayed by blustering, swaggering Actor Douglas. The story’s premises, e.g., that the reporter could bulldoze a high-powered corps of newsmen, grow increasingly harder to take. At the end, the picture loses even its guile: it wrenches Douglas out of character, drags in some fortuitous violence to pay him for his sins, drags out a silly ending for shabby theatrical effect. Surer taste and a sense of restraint would have made Ace in the Hole something better than an exercise in cynicism and technical ingenuity.

The Frogmen (20th Century-Fox), is a late addition to Hollywood’s muster roll of World War II movies, but it turns out to be one of the most absorbing of the lot. The picture turns the trick in spite of a battleworn plot about a tough-minded commander (Richard Widmark), whose overzealous sense of duty alienates his men (Dana Andrews et al.) until the crisis of battle finally brings them together. Its secret weapon: the work of the Navy’s underwater demolition teams, the swimmers who spearheaded U.S. amphibious invasions from Sicily to Okinawa.

Along with their uncommon courage and skill, the flipper-footed, goggle-eyed warriors in swimming trunks bring to the picture the nightmarish excitement of their strange underwater battlefield. Even above the surface, the simple techniques of the frogmen going into action are dramatically detailed: at a rhythmic signal, each man flops out of a destroyer’s speeding launch, flattens for a moment on a small rubber raft fastened alongside, then peels off into the sea as the next signal sends another man on to the skimming raft in his place. Below the surface, in a weirdly lighted world of coral, fish and man-made barriers, the frogmen reconnoiter the defenses of a Pacific invasion beach while others of their unit deliberately draw fire from a beach nearby.

Long before the transports arrive, the frogmen mine the concrete and steel traps with lung-bursting patience, blast them out of the path of the assault troops. Donning rubber suits and shoulder-fitted oxygen tanks, they give the picture its most gripping sequence by slipping through the steel net of a Japanese harbor to mine its submarine pens. For good measure, the movie tosses in a tense situation aboard the frogmen’s destroyer (commanded by Gary Merrill), when Widmark and Andrews undertake the ticklish job of disarming an unexploded Japanese torpedo that has pierced the ship’s hull.

Director Lloyd Bacon and his technical crew, working with what must be Hollywood’s coldest, wettest cast, have handled their subject with skill and resourcefulness. They shot for seven weeks in the waters off Norfolk, Key West and the Virgin Islands, used such special equipment as a seven-ton undersea camera bell, a Navy-developed underwater camera, anti-shark chemicals to protect the actors. John Tucker Battle’s script wisely keeps women out of the picture, serves as a dependable framework for the action scenes that make The Frogmen an arresting movie.

Night into Morning (MGM) unintentionally serves as a fine argument for the escapist entertainment that Hollywood makes best. It is a grim, dolorous movie about a college English professor (Ray Milland) who loses his wife and child in an explosion and searches for a way to go on living without them. He broods endlessly over the tragedy, finds no solace either in drink or in the advances of a tart (Jean Hagen), finally is brought to face life again through the efforts of an understanding friend (Nancy Davis), whose concern over him almost alienates her fiance (John Hodiak).

Despite intelligent performances and a kind of dreary integrity of purpose, Night into Morning mires down in the difficulty of saying anything to comfort the acutely bereaved without sounding platitudinous or inadequate. The effort to dramatize a message of hopeful solace seems even more hopeless, leaves the picture tediously uneventful, as sincere and futile as a note of condolence.

*A made-to-order ballad, The Death of Floyd Collins, did not appear until after Collins’ 18-day ordeal ended. Sample line: “His body now lies sleeping in a lonely sandstone cave.”