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1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970)
3. The Godfather, Part II (Coppola, 1974)
4. There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)
5. Ace in the Hole (Wilder, 1951)
6. Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946)
7. The Apartment (Wilder, 1960)
8. Umberto D. (De Sica, 1952)
9. 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963)
10. Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945)
All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
L'Avventura (Antonioni, 1960)
The Awful Truth (McCarey, 1937)
The Big Lebowski (Coen Brothers, 1998)
The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)
Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)
Cool Hand Luke (Rosenberg, 1967)
Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)
The Earrings of Madame De... (Oph�ls, 1953)
Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)
The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959)
Ghost World (Zwigoff, 2001)
Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais, 1959)
His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940)
In a Lonely Place (Ray, 1950)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan, 1962)
It's a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946)
The Naked Kiss (Fuller, 1964)
The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)
Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960)
Persona (Bergman, 1966)
The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940)
The Remains of the Day (Ivory, 1993)
Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)
Rififi (Dassin, 1955)
Secretary (Shainberg, 2002)
Shock Corridor (Fuller, 1963)
The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)
Some Like it Hot (Wilder, 1959)
A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan, 1951)
Suddenly, Last Summer (Mankiewicz, 1959)
Sunrise (Murnau, 1927)
Sunset Blvd. (Wilder, 1950)
Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
That Obscure Object of Desire (Bunuel, 1977)
The Third Man (Reed, 1949)
Viridiana (Bunuel, 1961)
The Virgin Spring (Bergman, 1960)
Waterloo Bridge (LeRoy, 1940)
Actors
1. Cary Grant (Notorious)
2. James Stewart (It's a Wonderful Life)
3. Humphrey Bogart (In a Lonely Place)
4. Paul Newman (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)
5. Anthony Hopkins (The Remains of the Day)
6. Jack Lemmon (Days of Wine and Roses)
7. Marlon Brando (Last Tango in Paris)
8. Robert Mitchum (The Night of the Hunter)
9. Claude Rains (Deception)
10. William Powell (My Man Godfrey)
Actresses
1. Bette Davis (All About Eve) 2. Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity)
3. Ingrid Bergman (Notorious)
4. Vivien Leigh (Gone with the Wind)
5. Monica Vitti (L'Avventura)
6. Jodie Foster (The Silence of the Lambs)
7. Naomi Watts (The Painted Veil)
8. Jean Arthur (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)
9. Kate Winslet (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
10. Marlene Dietrich (The Scarlet Empress)
Directors
1. Billy Wilder (The Apartment)
2. Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo)
3. Luis Bu�uel (That Obscure Object of Desire)
4. Ingmar Bergman (Persona)
5. Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver)
6. Howard Hawks (His Girl Friday)
7. Roman Polanski (Repulsion)
8. Samuel Fuller (The Naked Kiss)
9. Jules Dassin (Rififi)
10. Federico Fellini (8 1/2)
11. Buster Keaton (The General)
12. Joel and Ethan Coen (The Big Lebowski)
13. Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist)
14. Douglas Sirk (Imitation of Life)
15. Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows)
Books
1. Lolita, Vladamir Nabokov
2. White Oleander, Janet Fitch
3. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
4. The Reader, Bernhard Schlink
5. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
6. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
7. Oryx & Crake, Margaret Atwood
8. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
9. Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
10. Foxfire, Joyce Carol Oates
Reviews
Ace in the Hole (1951)
This hard-boiled egg is twenty minutes
Meet Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas). With a low growl and a sizeable assortment of personal affectations, he turns the tow truck driver into his personal chauffeur, he lights a match on the sliding typewriter, mocks everyone he charms and vice versa. With pride and self-contempt, he manages to sell himself to a newspaper by convincing the editor-in-chief that he is indispensable--even though he's been fired from eleven papers for good reasons. "I can handle big news and little news," he declares, "and if there's no news I'll go out and bite dog." He is machismo and self-hatred, and he will do anything for a buck. In other words, he is a typical Wilder anti-hero. A year later, Tatum has taken up his boss's habit of wearing belt and suspenders. To stave off boredom, he pesters his affectionate co-workers. His promised big break comes a year later: when covering the story of a rattlesnake hunt he hears of a treasure-seeker, Leo Minosa, trapped in a coal mine.
Enter Mrs. Minosa (Jan Sterling). The sneering bottle blonde would be as iconic as Norma Desmond and Phyllis Dietrichson had ACE IN THE HOLE been popular at the time of its release. Like Cora in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, she is trapped in a marriage with a man she doesn't love in a remote diner that doesn't generate any cash. Along comes the attractive but amoral man who offers both cash and sex. Most importantly cash. Cash is the name of the game for all characters in ACE IN THE HOLE. Leo gets trapped in pursuit of ancient Indian artifacts to sell, the implication being that the pursuit of wealth is imprisoning and that nothing is sacred. When Tatum successfully feeds off the sympathies of the masses, the S&M Entertainment Company trucks roll in to erect a lucrative circus. Folk singers, carnies, and thousands of people more interested on appearing on television than worrying about Leo amass. Everyone profits but the victim. When Leo's wife, after having drained the cash register of its last $11, retorts that "Honey, you like those rocks just as much as I do," she is not speaking just to Tatum but to the masses.
****MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW****
Never has a film noir more explicitly dealt with the theme of entrapment. Leo Minosa becomes a physical manifestation of the claustrophobia surrounding all the characters: Tatum's desperation to make a big story, Mrs. Minosa's desperation to transcend her dull existence, even the sheriff's desperation to be re-elected. In the mine shaft, dust streams down ceaselessly to pool on his face and body. Leo is being slowly buried alive while the drill makes a ceaseless, solemn pound. As it gets closer and closer it feels like the drums of death approaching, tormenting Leo. Grit gathers like fur on Leo's face, and the lighting becomes even more striking, casting ghastly shadows over his face. Here comes what might be Kirk Douglas' finest acting moment: The priest administers last rites for Leo and the camera cuts to Tatum's face during the words "bless me father for I have sinned. *I'm sorry*." Everything is there: profound guilt, shame, grief, a self-loathing that goes deeper than that ever-pounding drill. The consequences of his pathological ambition have finally crept up with him, and he too is being buried alive. The motif of suffocation comes full circle when Tatum wraps Mrs. Minosa's anniversary present--a fur that resembles a "skinned couple-a hungry rats"--around her neck and keeps pulling tighter. "I can't breath!" she gasps. He snarls back, "He can't breathe either."
This film is dismissed as cynical by people who don't want to acknowledge how close to reality it is. Acerbic? Absolutely. Sleazy? You bet. But there has never been a film--much less an old film--that so perfectly captured the bloodlust for the sensationalized human interest story. To write it off as cynical is to ignore the existence of yellow journalists who litter flashbulbs on their subjects, who ask them to confide their deepest anxieties before splashing them on the front page news, who alter and rewrite reality to make a better story. There have been other films such as NETWORK and A FACE IN THE CROWD that are praised for being crystal balls into the future of American media, but neither of which were nearly as condemning. There are traces of irony in ACE IN THE HOLE that can only be attributed to the fact that a story so excessive and absurd was actually based on *fact.*
57 years from its release and it hasn't aged a day. The only thing that separates the film from the world of today are the radio and newspaper journalists in lieu of television. There is a basic meanness, a violence, a grit that makes today's edgiest dramas look like white-washed fluff. Even Mrs. Minosa's wardrobe (a factor that ages the timeliest films) looks perfectly modern with its men's plaid shirts and rolled-up jeans. Billy Wilder has made half a dozen great films that could each be argued to be his masterpiece, but it is my opinion that ACE IN THE HOLE has and always will be Wilder's finest.