 A film in three minutes. I'm telling you chief, I got something you gotta wanna print. All I needs is a week. Just seven days and you'll have the biggest scoop of your life. Or my name isn't Chuck Tatum. Star reporter of Billy Wilder's 1951 satirical drama Ace in the Hole. A tragic tale of one man's ego and the shady workings of the press that features Kirk Douglas in the lead role, who gives one of his finest contributions to the silver screen. Yet in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the story follows dishevelled and disgraced journalist Tatum, a reporter who has been fired by 11 previous big-name newspapers for unethical behavior and now works at a small rural outfit. After a year of struggling to find a big story that can propel him back to fame, Tatum by chance happens upon a remote gas station where a local man has become trapped within a dangerously unstable cliff dwelling. Sensing an opportunity to manipulate circumstances to best elevate the news, Tatum takes charge of the recovery operation, eventually convincing the local sheriff, construction engineers and the wife of the trapped man to bend to his will, prolonging the rescue, with the end result taking the unscrupulous paper man down a path of self-destruction. Acting as both a searing satire on the power of the press and a dark exploration of human desire, Ace in the Hole, or the big carnival as it was known after Paramount Pictures changed the title, contains many targets that the legendary author-director Wilder gleefully takes aim at. The relationship between journalists and their subjects, the gullibility of the general public, the corruptibility of people in positions of authority, and the cynical cutthroat business decisions news editors make when chasing a story are all slowly twisted into something almost absurd but equally believable once Tatum's star rises. As such, it's hard not to relish witnessing the at-first somber situation develop into a media frenzy, with thousands of curious spectators quickly gathering near the rescue site, turning the location into a grotesque circus, where well-meaning but credulous citizens hang on Tatum's every word, whilst also attempting to make a buck or two in the process. Douglas delivers a tour de force performance as the controlling deceitful journalist commanding vicious, even ruthless authority over every person he needs to to keep the story going, slowly mutating over each passing day into a tragic, pitiable creature totally oblivious to the personal cost his actions will eventually demand until it becomes too late. Upon release, the film was received coldly by critics and audiences for its darkly lurid depiction of American journalism, but Ace in the Hole has been recognised decades later for its savage lampooning of the American dream, even being selected for preservation by the Congressional National Film Registry. Not a bad end-note for Wilder, Douglas and a script whose morality tale will never truly be out of print.