Trailer
Plot summary
Chuck Tatum lands a job at the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, the small daily that will have him, and tells the publisher Jacob Q. Boot plainly that he is only waiting for one big story to take him back to a big-city paper. A year of dull assignments passes. A stop for gas on the way to a rattlesnake hunt brings word that Leo Minosa is pinned in an old cliff dwelling. Tatum gets past the deputy sheriff and finds Leo alive under the debris. Lorraine, Leo's wife, is ready to leave him and the failing trading post. Sheriff Gus Kretzer controls the rescue at the cave.
Cast
- Frances Dominguezas Mama Minosa
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ace in the Hole (1951)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The plot drew on the 1925 case of W. Floyd Collins, who was trapped in Sand Cave, Kentucky, by a landslide; the Louisville Courier-Journal sent reporter William Burke Miller, whose coverage turned it into a national event and won him a Pulitzer Prize.
- Screenwriter Victor Desny sued Billy Wilder for plagiarism, saying he had pitched a film about the Floyd Collins story to Wilder's secretary in 1949. Judge Stanley Mosk ruled for Wilder and Paramount in 1953, but the California Supreme Court found Desny's oral submission legitimate in 1956.
- The film's exterior set, built 19 miles west of Gallup, New Mexico, was the largest non-combat set ever constructed at the time: 235 feet high, 1,200 feet wide and 1,600 feet deep, with an ancient cliff dwelling, a collapsed cave and a carnival site.
- Hays Code official Joseph Breen objected to the original script's corrupt sheriff and insisted Billy Wilder add dialogue making it clear the lawman would eventually be made to answer for his actions.
- Ace in the Hole was the first project Billy Wilder wrote, produced and directed himself, his first after parting with his long-time writing partner Charles Brackett, and his first critical and commercial failure.
- The 1992 Simpsons episode "Radio Bart" parallels the film, with Bart Simpson convincing the public that a boy named Timmy O'Toole had fallen into a well, prompting news coverage and charity campaigns; writer Jon Vitti credited creator Matt Groening with giving him the whole story.
- Without consulting director Billy Wilder, Paramount Pictures executive Y. Frank Freeman changed the film's title to The Big Carnival just before its release; it later reverted to Ace in the Hole.
- More than 1,000 extras and 400 cars were used in the crowd scenes, and after the film was completed Paramount Pictures charged the public admission to visit the set.
