Billy Wilder is a tall, loose-jointed man with a brain full of razor blades.
—William Holden
Writing in the mid-1950s, film critic Manny Farber praised certain Hollywood directors like Billy Wilder who would “tunnel” beneath the surfaces of the stories they were filming and seek to illuminate, in a shrewd and unsentimental fashion, deeper truths, usually about the unglamorous side of the human condition. These directors did not get bogged down in “significant” dialogue but told their stories in a straightforward fashion that nonetheless implied subtle themes beneath the surfaces of their basically plot-oriented scripts.1 Tunneling underneath the plot to reach a deeper meaning is a particularly apt metaphor for Ace in the Hole, which deals with a mine cave-in.
Ace in the Hole takes place in a rural town on the edge of a wasteland. Nevertheless, as Foster Hirsch shrewdly stresses, “Chuck Tatum merely transports a city mentality to an out-of-the-way setting.” Tatum, a former metropolitan newspaper man reduced to working for a rural rag, is “a city reporter type at heart with all the animal cunning of characters who inhabit the city jungle.”2 Tatum callously exploits the plight of Leo Minosa, who is trapped underground in a crumbling mine shaft, to advance his career. Tatum was to some extent based on Wilder, who worked for a scandal sheet in Berlin in the 1920s. “I was doing the dirty work of crime reporting,” he said. “Some of this I remembered for Ace in the Hole.”3 Wilder recalled taking the streetcar in Berlin to interview the parents of a murder victim and then taking another trolley to interview the parents of the murderer. He confessed that he made up the answers to the questions about how the murderer’s parents felt about their son, because he could not bring himself to ask.
When Wilder delivered the finished print of Sunset Boulevard in early February 1950, severing his professional connection with Brackett for good, he began casting about for a replacement writer. He continued to feel that he had an erratic command of English. Besides, “after Brackett and I split up, I found it too lonely to write by myself.” He added, “I sure miss him.”4
Wilder’s new writing partner was Walter Newman, a twenty-three-year-old radio writer. Wilder had heard one of Newman’s plays on his car radio and contacted him about collaborating on a screenplay. It was Newman who suggested to Wilder the concept of Ace in the Hole. After they had kicked around several possible ideas for a movie, Newman suggested the story of Floyd Collins, a cave explorer who had been the victim of a Kentucky mine cave-in twenty-five years earlier, as a good premise for a script. Wilder liked the idea of an updated version of the Collins tragedy and commissioned Newman to lay out a preliminary screen treatment of the plotline, under his supervision.
Wilder turned over Newman’s scenario to the story department in March 1950 with the tentative title “The Human Interest Story.” About that time, Wilder invited Lesser Samuels, a former newspaperman and a contract writer at Paramount, to join the team. The front office gave the project the green light after considering Newman’s treatment. The production was budgeted at $1.8 million; Wilder’s combined salary as cowriter, producer, and director was $250,000.
Newman’s scenario clearly followed the Floyd Collins story. On January 30, 1925, Collins was trapped by a landslide in a sandstone cavern near Mammoth Cave in central Kentucky. Robert Murray and Roger Brucker write in their book Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins that William Miller, an enterprising reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal, crawled into the cave “on his hands and knees” and was able to get close enough to Collins for a brief interview. Collins’s plight soon made national headlines. Throngs of sensation-hungry tourists from near and far descended on the cave site. “It was like a county fair,” Murray and Bruckner observe; “con artists abounded.” The crowds behaved as if they were at “a carnival midway. . . . In the process the majority forgot about the imprisoned man underground.”5 Miller continued to cover the rescue operation until Collins’s death finally ended his ordeal. He had been trapped in the mine for eighteen days. In May 1926, Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for his reportage.
Wilder, Newman, and Samuels toiled on the first draft of the script throughout the spring of 1950. Studio insiders were anxious to see whether Wilder could succeed without his former writing partner. In some quarters Wilder was considered a heartless cynic whose excessive contempt for humanity had been controlled and toned down by his wise partner. Without Brackett’s steadying hand, they were certain, Wilder would fall on his face. But Wilder did not play it safe on his first film without Brackett as his chief collaborator. After all, he had chosen for his next film a story with an unsympathetic lead character: a cocksure newspaper man who exemplifies the American mania for making a quick buck, even at the expense of someone else’s personal tragedy. Furthermore, Wilder was starting from scratch on an original screenplay, instead of buying the rights to a successful play or novel. “Usually the studio prefers to bank on a sure-fire property,” he explained. Wilder was aware of the gossip in the commissary about his next film. He always viewed making a movie as climbing up to the peak of Mount Everest. The studio wags “can’t wait for me to slip into a crevasse,” he mused ruefully.6
The first draft of the screenplay, dated May 31, 1950, has a handwritten note stapled to the first page: “Do not give out under any circumstances to anyone!” Wilder was worried that news of this scenario, which was designed to skewer the newspaper business, would find its way into the local gossip columns, precipitating an uproar in the press. The draft begins in the Albuquerque train depot, where Jacob Boot, a newspaper editor, watches a pine box being loaded into the baggage car of a train. “Good-bye, Mr. Boot,” says Chuck Tatum in voice-over; “when you write the obit, lay it on the line. All you’ve got on me! What I wanted, and what I did to get it. Remember the very first day I hit this God-forsaken town of yours?”7 It is Tatum in the box; Wilder was repeating the concept of having a talking corpse narrate the film, as Joe Gillis had narrated Sunset Boulevard.
In the final shooting script, however, Wilder scrapped the original opening in the train station for one in which Tatum arrives in Albuquerque in a coupe with New York license plates. His convertible breaks down because of burned-out bearings and is laid up for repairs in a local garage. Tatum, who is down on his luck, takes the occasion to inquire about a job on the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. He makes his pitch to Jacob Boot, managing editor of the Sun-Bulletin, but Boot is not particularly impressed. Tatum, it develops, has been kicked off some top eastern dailies for dishonesty and drinking on the job. When Boot inquires whether Tatum drinks a lot, Tatum replies with a typical Wilder witticism: “Not a lot, just frequently.”
Boot prominently displays his paper’s motto, “Tell the truth,” in an embroidered sampler hanging above his desk, “as a sign of his and the newspaper’s guiding ethic.”8 Tatum, whose ethical standards are “flexible,” to say the least, sees that Boot will need a lot of persuasion to hire him. So he launches into a high-pressure spiel: “Apparently you haven’t seen my byline; that’s because you don’t get the Eastern papers out here. Mr. Boot, I’m a $250 a week newspaperman. I can be had for $50. I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog, to create some. . . . Make that $45.”9 Boot is overwhelmed by the sheer force of Tatum’s braggadocio and hires him for a salary of $60 a week.
“Tatum’s a hungry guy who bites off more than he can swallow,” Wilder explained with gusto. “What we have is an indictment of a reporter like Tatum who has recently been writing for cheesy tabloids.” Tatum has no scruples about sensationalizing a news event to sell more papers, Wilder continued. “On the other side, we have a publisher, an old-time newspaperman, Jacob Boot, who makes some telling points about honor in his profession.” Boot is the only individual in the film who stands for journalistic integrity.10
On July 6, 1950, just four days before the beginning of principal photography, the shooting script was finished. Wilder sent a copy to Joseph Breen, who responded that the script was lacking “a proper voice for morality” at the end.11 He was especially concerned about the portrayal of the local sheriff as corrupt. As Richard Armstrong notes, Sheriff Gus Kretzer has “all the scruples of the rattlesnake he carries around with him” in a cardboard box.12 Tatum knows how useful to the sheriff “the prolonged publicity of an extended rescue operation would be in the sheriff’s forthcoming election campaign.”13 He arranges to prolong the rescue operation by convincing Sheriff Kretzer to employ outmoded methods in digging Leo out. This will give Tatum more time to dramatize the rescue and the sheriff’s part in it. Breen was relatively easy on the script of Wilder’s nihilistic movie because Tatum ultimately pays for his transgressions with his life. But Breen and his advisers believed that “Sheriff Kretzer breezes out of the story a little too easily, considering the malice of his misdeeds throughout the story.” The censor expected Wilder to provide some additional dialogue, “which will make it clear that Kretzer will be answerable for his evil in the near future.”14 Wilder made a concession to Breen by having Boot declare that he plans to write an exposé about the sheriff, which will ruin Kretzer’s chances at reelection. Breen accepted this change.
Wilder signed Kirk Douglas for the pivotal role of Chuck Tatum. Douglas had played the career-making part of the unscrupulous boxer in Mark Robson’s Champion (1949); consequently he seemed right to enact the role of the selfish, scheming, cocky Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole. But Douglas had some misgivings about the character. When he approached the part, he wrote Wilder a letter, stating, “Look, Billy, I think I’m being a little too tough. . . . For God’s sake, Billy, please understand that I am not being one of those typical actors who is trying to write a screenplay.”15 Douglas thought the character was too unlikable and would forfeit audience sympathy. Wilder conceded that he had not made Tatum sympathetic but noted that he was an interesting, even riveting character. “He didn’t see it my way,” Douglas concluded, “so I did the best I could.”16 Douglas recalled that Wilder sent him “to work at the Herald Examiner as a rookie reporter for a week before shooting began.” He learned the ropes of the newspaper business during that week.17
The only substantial woman’s role in the picture was Lorraine Minosa, Leo’s slatternly wife, who has become increasingly bored with working in Leo’s souvenir shop. The part went to Jan Sterling, who had recently played a jailbird in John Cromwell’s Caged (1950). Sterling accepted the role of Lorraine because “it was the first really good part I’d had.”18 Richard Benedict, who usually played heavies in films like Maxwell Shane’s City across the River (1949), was called on to play Leo, one of the few sympathetic roles in his résumé.
Wilder stuck to his usual team behind the camera. Supervising editor Doane Harrison was with him as always, as were editor Arthur Schmidt, who was the cutter on Sunset Boulevard, and director of photography Charles Lang, who shot A Foreign Affair. Hal Pereira, who was production designer on Double Indemnity, was now head of Paramount’s art department, replacing Hans Dreier. At Wilder’s behest, Pereira appointed Earl Hedrick, who had designed the sets for The Lost Weekend, as production designer on Ace in the Hole. Pereira, of course, monitored Hedrick’s work, as Dreier had monitored his.
Principal photography began on July 10, 1950, with location work on the streets of Albuquerque around the offices of the Sun-Bulletin. The following day, the film unit moved to a barren stretch of land outside Gallup, New Mexico. It was there that Hedrick and his production team had set up Leo Minosa’s souvenir shop, known as the local trading post. The exterior of the cave in which Leo is trapped was not far away (the cave interior was built on a soundstage at Paramount). There was plenty of room in the arid landscape outside Gallup to accommodate the crowds of extras, recruited from the nearby towns, who were playing the curious tourists attracted by the mine catastrophe.
“I looked up the Floyd Collins story,” said Wilder. “There was a circus up there. There were hustlers trying to make a fast buck; they were selling hot dogs. . . . They composed a song.” So in Wilder’s film, throngs of morbid gawkers flock by the hundreds to the isolated outpost that is the site of Leo Minosa’s ordeal. The protracted rescue operation thus evolves into a carnival. The fairground that Hedrick designed encompassed concession stands, a Ferris wheel, a press tent, and a parking lot. It was one of the largest outdoor sets ever constructed for a movie: twelve hundred feet wide and sixteen hundred feet long.19
As for the lugubrious “anthem” composed for the event, Wilder took the liberty of having a song played while the rescue mission is in progress. The actual song inspired by Floyd Collins’s tragedy, “The Death of Floyd Collins,” was recorded by country singer Vernon Dalhart in 1925 and sold 3 million copies.20 For the song in the movie, “We’re Coming, Leo,” Wilder called on the songwriting team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, who had done a cameo in Sunset Boulevard, playing their hit song “Buttons and Bows” in a party scene. Wilder commissioned them to write “the worst song you can, with bad rhymes and everything else bad.”21 They obligingly came up with a promotional jingle designed to lure the sensation seekers to the site of the mine cave-in:
We’re coming, Leo, so don’t despair.
While you are cave a-hopin’
We will finally make an openin’.
The climax of the location shooting came on July 25. It was a helicopter shot of the media circus surrounding the cave; seven hundred extras participated, mostly local citizens. The location footage that Wilder accomplished in conjunction with Charles Lang is vivid and authentic. Wilder declared that paying close attention to milieu was the only way he could approach his characters, so that their situations came to life on the screen. Commenting on Lang’s cinematography, Wilder said that too many cinematographers—unlike Lang—“are working for the goddamned Academy Award,” and hence want to use a lot of elaborate shots. Wilder emphasized that he did not admire “fancy camerawork, with the camera hanging off the chandelier. That’s to astonish the middle-class critics.”22 Both Wilder and Lang wanted Ace in the Hole to have the unvarnished look of straight reportage. Their work on this film has what Manny Farber terms “a chilling documentary exactness.”23 Wilder wrapped up the location shooting on August 2, 1951, and the film unit decamped for the soundstages of Paramount in Hollywood. Filming ended on September 11; it had lasted a total of forty-five days—fifteen days shorter than the shooting schedule of Sunset Boulevard.
The composer available to score the picture was the Academy Award–winner Hugo Friedhofer (The Best Years of Our Lives). “It is not important for the audience to be aware of the technique by which music affects them; but affect them it must,” he once said. “The listeners should be aware subliminally how the score winds through the movie . . . and integrates the film experience.”24 Initially Wilder wanted Friedhofer to compose a more melodic score than the dissonant one Friedhofer wrote for him. Wilder “was upset that I hadn’t written a schmaltzy score,” Friedhofer remembered, perhaps because Wilder wanted the score to offset the harshness of the story line. “It’s a good score; but there isn’t a note of melody in it,” Wilder complained. Friedhofer answered, “Billy, you’ve had the courage to put on the screen a bunch of really reprehensible people. Did you want me to soften them?”25
The most reprehensible character in Ace in the Hole, of course, is Chuck Tatum, who cajoles Jacob Boot into giving him a job as a reporter after he has flunked out as a journalist on some New York dailies. Tatum chafes at being exiled to a burg like Albuquerque. In fact, he looks on his job on the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin as a stopover in this “sun-baked Siberia” on his way back to the big time.
One of the routine assignments that Boot gives Tatum is to cover a rattlesnake hunt in the wilderness on the outskirts of town. Stopping for gas en route, Tatum pulls into Leo Minosa’s trading post, which is near an ancient Indian cave dwelling. Tatum learns that Leo, who entered the abandoned cave in search of ancient artifacts and relics to sell in his souvenir shop, is now trapped in a mudslide. Tatum immediately recognizes that the disaster has the makings of an exclusive news story for him to write—with a byline. Leo Minosa is Tatum’s “ace in the hole.” Indeed, Tatum’s scoop will result in headlines all over the country and will get him back in “the big leagues.” (Because Wilder learned English by listening to baseball games on the radio, his film scripts abound in baseball metaphors.)
Tatum enters the cavern and digs his way to the place where Leo is up to his waist in sand and shale. He assures Leo that help is on the way. The two-faced Tatum then convinces Sheriff Kretzer not to have the rescue party shore up the crumbling wall of the tunnel with timber, in order to extricate Leo from the mine shaft in a matter of hours. Instead, he persuades the sheriff to instruct the engineers to drill through solid rock from the top of the cave, a lengthy process that could endanger Leo’s life. This will give Tatum several days in which to build his big news story to produce maximum publicity. The sheriff agrees in return for having a sign posted at the cave entrance reading, “Reelect Sheriff Kretzer.” Tatum loses no time in phoning in the lurid story of the mine catastrophe to Boot: “Unless war is declared tonight, here is your front-page feature!” Afterward he says to himself, “Now that they’ve pitched me a big one, I’m gonna smack it right out of the ball park!”
That same day, Leo’s jaded wife, Lorraine, who has been looking for a chance to get free of her dead-end marriage, decides to desert her trapped husband. Lorraine finds life dull, living in a wasteland on the edge of town and clerking in Leo’s trading post. “We sell a case of soda pop a week,” she whines to Tatum, “and once in a while a Navajo rug.” Tatum intercepts her just as she is preparing to fly the coop, and he begs her to stay. He needs her to help him give his news dispatches some human interest. “Your husband is stuck under a mountain; you’re worried sick,” Tatum explains. “That’s the way the story goes.” Lorraine insists that she is leaving anyway. “You’ll just have to rewrite me,” she says with a shrug. Finally Tatum, shrewdly appealing to her greed, persuades her that the souvenir shop will become a gold mine once the press and the carnival promoters lure crowds to the cavern where Leo is entombed. Lorraine catches on quickly; soon she is charging admission to the cave site and hawking souvenirs at Leo’s trading post. At one point Wilder shows Lorraine in close-up biting into an apple, implying that she recalls Eve in the Old Testament. Lorraine, a temptress in this decadent Eden, coaxes Tatum into committing adultery with her.
Swarms of sensation mongers begin to converge on the fairground surrounding the cave, arriving aboard a train, “the Leo Minosa Special.” They are greeted by a band blaring out “We’re Coming, Leo,” the theme song of this media circus. A traveling carnival has set up shop near the cave. An announcer, speaking over a public address system, welcomes the crowds to “this community of tents and trailers”; a billboard assures the customers that “proceeds go to the Leo Minosa Rescue Fund.” Wilder’s satire is unrelenting.
Meanwhile, Tatum’s relationship with Lorraine has become strained. He says to her testily, “It’s Sunday. Aren’t you going to church?” She replies, “I don’t go to church; kneeling bags my nylons.” Wilder credited this gem of a line to his wife, Audrey—“How would I know a thing like that?” But Tatum is not to be deterred by Lorraine’s indifference. He insists that she attend the rosary service at the local Mexican church so he can get photographs of her for his press coverage as the “grief-stricken wife,” praying for her husband’s safety.26 (Tatum obviously chooses to overlook that Lorraine has made several passes at him.)
Becoming more impatient with Lorraine, Tatum snaps, “Wipe that smile off your face.” After all, she is playing the role of the anxious wife. “Make me!” she replies, defiantly. Tatum responds by slapping her across the face. Lorraine finally agrees to go to the Catholic service, but she adds, “Don’t ever slap me again, Mister.” Then she smiles. She says she is relenting only because Tatum wrote a flattering piece about Leo’s “loyal wife” in the afternoon edition of the Sun-Bulletin. “Tomorrow this will be yesterday’s paper,” he retorts, “and they’ll wrap fish in it.”
When Tatum pays another visit to Leo in the cavern, Leo expresses his growing anxiety that he cannot survive much longer. He asks Tatum to deliver to Lorraine a fur stole that he bought for her as an anniversary present, since he probably will not live to see their anniversary. Tatum is all too aware that Lorraine is not the devoted wife that Leo thinks she is, but he keeps that to himself. Instead he simply promises to do what Leo asks. But Leo’s wife takes one look at the mangy fur piece, which is all that Leo could afford, and sneers, “He must have skinned a couple of hungry rats.” Then she drops it on the floor with disdain. Tatum is appalled by the floozy’s cold indifference to her hapless husband. In a fit of rage, Tatum snatches up the stole, wraps it around her neck, and begins to choke her with it. Lorraine is nearly asphyxiated; in self-defense she turns on Tatum, grabs a pair of scissors, and plunges them into his stomach. When Wilder called, “Cut!” Douglas noticed that Sterling’s face was blue and she was gasping for breath. He exclaimed, “Good God, Jan! If I was squeezing you too hard, why didn’t you tell me?” She answered weakly, “I couldn’t, because you were choking me!”27
Tatum receives word that Leo is dying of pneumonia. Tatum is painfully aware that he has placed Leo’s life in jeopardy unnecessarily, just to get his scoop. He recalls that, during his last visit with Leo in the mine shaft, Leo requested that he bring a Catholic priest to administer the last rites. The guilt-ridden Tatum does so. As Leo recites the act of contrition, Wilder cuts to a close-up of the anguished, remorseful Tatum, who is the real sinner present. Leo, the poor chump, lies dying, still convinced that Tatum is his best friend. He will die without knowing about Tatum’s treachery. Compelling scenes like this one prevent the film from becoming a tasteless sideshow.
Inevitably, Leo expires in the dank pit with Tatum standing by. Tatum, who is gradually losing blood from his stab wound, goes outside the cave, grabs a microphone, and announces to the crowd that Leo Minosa is dead. “Now go home, all of you; the circus is over.” The carnival tent collapses and the gaping sightseers evaporate. Lorraine hits the road with her suitcase; she is last seen in extreme long shot, hitching a ride on the highway, aimlessly headed for nowhere in particular.
Meanwhile Tatum, filled with self-loathing, attempts to file his final dispatch, in which he confesses the part he played in Leo’s demise. But none of the wire services are interested; not even the Sun-Bulletin will print his confession. “He realizes, of course, that a dead man is no longer a news item,” comments Bernard Dick, and Leo Minosa is dead.28 Now that his grand deception has turned sour, Tatum realizes that he will never be able to tell the world of his gigantic hoax. The only one around to hear Tatum’s confession is Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur), a cub reporter who once looked up to Tatum as a role model. But now even Herbie is thoroughly disillusioned with Tatum.
Tatum lurches into the office of the Sun-Bulletin; he is leaking blood from his fatal wound, as Walter Neff does at the end of Double Indemnity. In a variation of the spiel he delivered to Boot at the beginning of the film, Tatum proclaims, “Mr. Boot, I’m a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing!” Tatum pitches forward toward the camera, which is positioned on the floor, and falls into an extreme close-up, dead. “We dug a hole and put the camera there,” said Wilder. “We stood in the hole with the camera” so that Douglas’s face was only inches away from the lens when he collapsed. “The shot was always in my mind, but it wasn’t in the script. . . . That was one of the few times I went for a bold shot like that.” Wilder wanted to end on a powerful image of Tatum.29
“Wilder’s anti-heroes are never just heels,” writes Kevin Lally; “he understands their human frailty too well to deny them the potential for self-examination, no matter how repellant their behavior.” Tatum somehow senses that it is only right that he should pay for his crime by succumbing to the stab wound inflicted by Lorraine. The ending, Lally states, “is certainly not a cop-out.” A recurring theme in Wilder’s most powerful films is that of “a wretched opportunist wistfully seeking redemption.”30
When Ace in the Hole opened in July 1951, it flopped with a resounding thud. Several reviewers loathed the film, calling it an unwarranted attack on the integrity of the American press. Wilder personally was denounced as a cynic who had made a rancid movie “without a sliver of compassion for the human race,” which is gleefully portrayed at its worst. Wilder had a rattlesnake’s view of the world, said one critic; “this film has fangs.”31 Filmmaker Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World) emphasizes that “most critics considered themselves newspapermen and therefore within the target range of the movie’s furious contempt.” So it was not surprising that several reviewers excoriated Ace in the Hole. “Of course the rapacious hunger of tabloid news gatherers for their scoop,” he continued, “is nothing more than accurately presented in the movie.”32 Kirk Douglas noted that Wilder’s treatment of the news media became more credible over time because the excesses of the tabloid press became more familiar. “Newsmen will sometimes stretch their objective reporting to make a story more sensational,” he observed.33
Wilder stubbornly refused to acknowledge that Ace in the Hole was a ferocious condemnation of the human race. But he realized in retrospect that, when a director stages an incident of this kind—in which a character’s life hangs in the balance—usually the audience implicitly assumes that he will show the helpless person being saved in the nick of time, thereby releasing the tension that has built up in the audience. Consequently, the audience feels cheated if the threatened peril actually overtakes the innocent party and they are denied the satisfaction of seeing the individual emerge unharmed. In depicting this gruesome calamity as he does, Wilder is rather like the director of an old silent serial, showing the heroine who is tied to the railroad tracks really being run over by the oncoming train. Wilder reflected that portraying this sympathetic man perishing in such a dreadful fashion was a cardinal sin; it elicited a severely negative audience reaction. “At the very least, I should have had Leo’s demise occur off screen,” he said. “But I am always rewriting my films in my head years after they are finished.” In any event, he always thought of Ace in the Hole as “the runt of the litter.”
Shortly after he read the scalding reviews of the movie, Wilder witnessed an auto accident while driving down Wilshire Boulevard. “Somebody was run over right in front of me; I wanted to help the guy who was run over.” A newspaper cameraman came out of nowhere and took a picture of the injured party. Wilder called to him, “You’d better call an ambulance.” The photographer replied, “I’ve got to get to the Los Angeles Times; I’ve got a picture here that I’ve got to deliver!” Wilder concluded, “You put that in a movie, and the critics think you’re exaggerating.”34 Emphasizing just how callous and insensitive “the gentlemen of the press” can be, Wilder also recalled a reporter once asking him “how did I feel when I learned my mother had died at Auschwitz.” He concluded, “It makes you wonder just how cynical Ace in the Hole really was.”35
Panic broke out at the studio when Ace in the Hole failed to leave the starting gate. The American press made such an outcry against the picture that Y. Frank Freeman, who was still vice president at Paramount, dispatched relays of publicity agents to city desks around the country to explain that “the picture’s depiction of trashy journalism was not directed against the Fourth Estate as such,” but only against its bad apples.36 No dice. The mass audience still stayed away in droves.
The film was better received overseas; Europeans did not mind a Hollywood film criticizing the American press. In fact, the movie won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Freeman decided that the favorable publicity attending the Venice award, along with a more benign title for the picture, might resuscitate the film’s chances of finding an audience in the United States. He accordingly attempted to tie “a pretty bow” around the movie by retitling it The Big Carnival and reissuing it in the domestic market. He made this decision without Wilder’s knowledge or consent; Wilder was so incensed that for the first time he began to consider leaving Paramount for good. At all events, when the picture did not go well with the substitute title, said Wilder, “they changed it back again to Ace in the Hole; but it was too late.”37
Wilder had been the kingpin at Paramount; now some people around the studio shunned him. His gut reaction to his detractors at the studio was, “Fuck them all—it is the best picture I ever made!” Still, he continued, “Ace in the Hole cost me power at the studio.”38 The fact that it was his first picture without Brackett boded ill for Wilder’s future, according to studio insiders. They were saying that Ace in the Hole was a flop because Wilder no longer had Brackett to guide him in writing a screenplay. Moreover, Richard Lemon notes, “He was warned that his next picture had to earn enough profit to cover both movies.”39
In 1952 a journalist named Herbert Luft submitted a hostile essay about Wilder’s films—especially Ace in the Hole—under the title “A Matter of Decadence,” to the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television. Because it was clearly one-sided, the editors wisely invited Charles Brackett, who was now president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to supply a rebuttal. Brackett graciously agreed to do so, particularly because he wanted to demonstrate that he still had faith in his erstwhile collaborator. Brackett accordingly wrote an essay titled “A Matter of Humor.” The essays were published together as “Two Views of a Director” in the Fall 1952 issue of the Quarterly.
Luft weighed in with the objection that Wilder, “like many Germans”—though Wilder’s heritage was Austrian—“depicted only the weaknesses and shortcomings of the American people in films like A Foreign Affair, Sunset Boulevard, and Ace in the Hole.” Luft contended in his broadside against Wilder that these films denigrated America and that Wilder was himself anti-American.40 Brackett replied emphatically that he found Wilder “sassy and brash and often unwise; but he was in love with America as I have seen few people in love with it.”41
Luft reserved his biggest blast for Ace in the Hole, which in his judgment was Wilder’s most corrupt film: it implies not only that newspaper reporters are prone to sensationalize the news but that Americans are insensitive sensation seekers who “take guided tours of the cave where a man is virtually buried alive.”42 Brackett maintained that, on the contrary, Ace in the Hole was “in the vein of American self-criticism which has been a major current in our national literature since the days of The Octopus and The Jungle.” Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) were in the muckraking tradition of American letters—social protest novels deploring the plight of the downtrodden working classes in America. In conclusion, Brackett noted Luft’s contention that Wilder flayed the characters in his films and explained that Wilder rather acknowledged that “time, which flays us all mercilessly,” spares no one.43
Wilder’s brooding tale is galvanized by Kirk Douglas’s astounding performance as the tormented protagonist. When Douglas won the AFI’s Life Achievement Award in 1991, George Stevens Jr. paid this tribute to him: “No other leading actor was ever more ready to tap the dark, desperate side of the soul and thus to reveal the complexity of human nature. His special gift had been to show us the flaws in every hero and the virtues in every heel.”44 Douglas’s Chuck Tatum certainly exemplifies Stevens’s statement.
Ace in the Hole has been rediscovered as a picture of quality in recent years by critics and film historians. On August 16, 2002, the AFI officially proclaimed this movie as an overlooked masterpiece by presenting a special screening of the picture in Los Angeles, hosted by film director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men). The rediscovery of the film was highlighted by a full week’s run at New York’s Film Forum in January 2007, in which a newly restored print was screened. On that occasion, Wilder was called “the most precise, indeed, relentless, chronicler of the postwar American scene, in shade as well as light, the motion pictures have ever produced.” Manohla Dargis praised how nimbly Ace in the Hole presents Wilder’s jaundiced view of American hucksterism.45
After Wilder’s partnership with Brackett ended, he tried out a number of script collaborators, but none more than once, because, in his estimation, they did not cut the mustard. Wilder parted company with Newman and Samuels by mutual agreement after Ace in the Hole foundered. None of them wished to tackle another screenplay together, with that fiasco hanging over their heads. Wilder next turned to Edwin Blum, a veteran screenwriter whose credits included The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), Basil Rathbone’s first outing as Holmes, and Jules Dassin’s The Canterville Ghost (1944), an Oscar Wilde fantasy with Charles Laughton. Blum was under contract to Paramount, and the studio executives considered him an experienced screenwriter.
Wilder knew he had to be very cautious in the selection of his next project, in the wake of his recent debacle. He reasoned that a popular Broadway play would be a safe bet. “I used to go to New York every year and see the new plays,” he told me, “and when I saw one I liked, I considered filming it.” He eventually chose Stalag 17, a smash hit by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski. The production, directed by Jose Ferrer, had opened at the Forty-eighth Street Theatre on May 8, 1951. Wilder had seen it on his excursion to New York and considered it a valuable property. The play is set in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II—a prison camp very much like the one in which Bevan and Trzcinski had been interned.
When Wilder suggested the project to Paramount, however, he found that a reader in the story department had earlier submitted an unfavorable report on the original version of the play, which had opened in a trial run in Philadelphia on April 6, 1949, with the unwieldy title Stalag XVII-B. The reader’s report said that the play was “monotonous and lacking in action” and recommended that the studio not acquire it for filming. But that report was filed before the revised version of the play opened on Broadway in 1951 and became a runaway success. When the play was resubmitted to Paramount, the studio brass this time around found it a very promising property. At Wilder’s behest Paramount shelled out one hundred thousand dollars for the screen rights in August 1951.46 The jungle telegraph at the studio spread the word that Wilder was once more in the studio’s good graces.
Bevan and Trzcinski described the play as a comedy-melodrama about American GIs interned in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. It is marked by liberal doses of raucous barracks humor, but it is rooted in the despair of men confined in a squalid prison compound for the foreseeable future. Blum did not immediately understand why the play appealed to Wilder and asked him what he saw in it. Without batting an eyelash, Wilder replied, “There are guys running around in their underwear. . . . You didn’t see it, so you don’t appreciate it.”47 Blum was still incredulous about the merits of the play, but he had just been put on salary at one thousand dollars a week; hence he was not inclined to argue the point.
The title of the play refers to a German Stalag, short for stamm lager (prisoner-of-war camp). The real Stalag 17 was situated on the outskirts of Krems, Austria, near the Danube and less than fifty miles from Vienna. Stalag 17 and The Emperor Waltz are the only two Wilder pictures set in his native Austria. Wilder preferred to overlook that his homeland was part of the Nazi empire at the time Stalag 17 takes place, so the setting of the film is not identified as Austria.
Wilder retained the fundamental story line of the play. The prisoners endeavor to smoke out a Nazi informer their captors have planted in their midst, disguised as an American prisoner. Their chief suspect is J. J. Sefton, a loner and a blackmarket profiteer whom they dislike and distrust. Hence Sefton is determined to uncover the real spy and avoid being his scapegoat.
Wilder set out to spruce up the play, first of all with some new characters. He created Sefton’s minion Cookie (who would be played by Gil Stratton Jr.) to provide a voice-over narration. Stratton said, “Billy wanted the narration, so that, if something in the script needed to be explained,” he could cover it with a line added to the narration. Stratton continued, “The original script opened in the Paramount barbershop, where Cookie is a barber after the war.” Y. Frank Freeman, the vice president of Paramount, comes in for a haircut, and Cookie asks him, “Why haven’t you made a picture about POWs, when you have made movies about flyers and infantrymen? I was a POW.” With that, Cookie begins to recount his experiences in Stalag 17 to Freeman, and the events of the film are portrayed in flashback. “At the end, the picture comes back to the barbershop,” Stratton explained. “Cookie tells Freeman that Sefton reenlisted when the Korean War broke out, and is now in Korea,” pulling off the same kinds of scams on the other soldiers that he did in Stalag 17. Since Wilder never got along with Freeman, it is amazing that Freeman agreed to do a cameo in Wilder’s movie. Be that as it may, Wilder retained the narrator but scrapped the prologue and epilogue in the barbershop. “And he was right not to use this material,” concluded Stratton, since Wilder thought it was a bit arch.48
Another key character whom Wilder invented for the movie was Colonel von Scherbach, the commandant of the prison camp, who is referred to in the play but never appears on stage. Wilder called on his fellow Austrian émigré director Otto Preminger to play the commandant. Preminger told me, “I played only Nazis during the war, because there were no Nazis available to do it. Later on I played the Commandant for my old friend Billy Wilder in Stalag 17.”49 In his first scene, Preminger sets the tone for his depiction of the nasty commandant as he snarls, with maniacal glee, “Nobody has ever escaped from Stalag 17—not alive, anyway.” It was ironic that Preminger played Nazis so convincingly, since he was, like Wilder, “a Jewish refugee who had to flee from Hitler.”50 Preminger’s enacting the role of a Nazi officer in the present film recalls Erich von Stroheim’s playing Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo, although von Scherbach is certainly more stiff-necked and inflexible than Rommel in the earlier movie.
There is one strategic question that confronts any filmmaker who wants to film a stage play: To what extent should the play be opened out spatially for the screen, by including more settings than were possible in the theater, to exploit the greater flexibility of the motion picture medium? Asked this question, Wilder answered that, on the one hand, he wanted to build up the claustrophobic atmosphere of prison life in Stalag 17 by emphasizing in his visual compositions the cramped conditions in which the prisoners live: “I wanted the audience to experience the confinement of the prisoners, and therefore I shot no scenes outside of the prison compound.” Indeed, Stalag 17 is Wilder’s most enclosed film. On the other hand, Wilder said, he would not consider having the movie take place entirely on one set, barrack 4, which is crammed with bunks. He opened out the play for the screen effectively, explains Holden’s biographer Bob Thomas, “by taking the action outdoors into the muddy prison yard, so he could get some of the drama out in the open.”51
What’s more, in transposing Stalag 17 from stage to screen, Wilder decided to write into the action events that take place offstage and are merely related in dialogue passages in the play. For example, the scene in which Commandant von Scherbach interrogates Lieutenant Dunbar (played by Don Taylor in the film), a prisoner accused of sabotage, is staged in the commandant’s office in the movie.
Wilder also added some incidents to the screenplay that are not in the play at all. They are built around Sefton’s character as a crafty con man who learns to capitalize on the misery of his fellow inmates by pandering to the lowest tastes of his fellow prisoners of war and bartering with the prison guards for cameras, bottles of wine, and other contraband items.52 His foot locker becomes a treasure chest of cartons of cigarettes, watches, and other amenities. Sefton obtains a makeshift telescope from one of the guards. He then charges his fellow inmates two cigarettes or a candy bar as admission for a peep show he has set up in the barracks—through the telescope, they can ogle the naked female prisoners as they parade by the dusty window of the delousing shack in the women’s compound across the way. “You couldn’t catch much through the steam,” Cookie comments in his voice-over narration. “But believe you me, after two years in that camp, just the idea of what was behind that steam sure spurred up your voltage.” Donald Bevan explained, “The Russian broads,” as the GIs call them, “were not in the play, but similar incidents did happen in a POW camp.”
Wilder obviously made some significant alterations in the play when he adapted it for the screen. In the process, with Blum’s assistance, he rewrote most of the play’s dialogue. Bevan did not mind, but his coauthor, Trzcinski, was offended by the many changes. He complained that he no longer recognized the play that he and Bevan had written. Trzcinski had a small part in the film, as a prisoner named Triz, but he stopped speaking to Wilder after shooting was finished. “If I’d been him, I would have stopped too,” Wilder admitted.53 Nevertheless, Wilder was sure that he had vastly improved the play by revising it for film as he did.
As usual, Wilder did not complete the shooting script until the last minute. The shooting script is dated January 30, 1952, four days before principal photography was scheduled to begin. Consequently, Wilder was once again tardy in making a copy of the script available to the industry censor; it was delivered to Breen’s office on February 1. The rowdy barracks humor, which offers much-needed comic relief from the picture’s darker moments, bothered Breen the most. He objected to the crude phrases employed by one GI to another such as, “Why don’t you take this whistle and shove it?” Wilder sought to justify such rough language as typical of soldiers in wartime. One of the inmates, Stosh Krusawa, an oversexed lug, is fittingly nicknamed “Animal.” He is a “brawny, unshaven retard in long johns.”54 Stosh asks a prison guard whether some of the Russian broads from the neighboring compound might visit the GIs’ barracks. He urges, “Just get us a couple with big glockenspiels!”55 Following his customary procedure in negotiating with Breen, Wilder made a token gesture of cooperation by changing a few lines, such as the one about the whistle. But he politely ignored some of Breen’s other objections. Thus the double entendre about the “glockenspiels” remained in the shooting script.56
The Christmas party scene, which is not in the play, in particular disturbed Breen. In it Stosh gets soused on the potent schnapps Sefton brews from potato peels, which Harry, Stosh’s sidekick and a real chump, says tastes like nitric acid. Strictly for laughs, Harry stuffs straw under his hat and masquerades as Betty Grable, Stosh’s favorite pinup. The prisoners have voted Grable “the girl they would most like to have behind barbed wire,” and Harry once promised to get Stosh a date with Grable after the war. In his woozy state, Stosh mistakes Harry for Grable. As the phonograph is playing a popular song of the time, “I Love You,” Stosh timidly asks Harry for a dance. Wilder conveys Stosh’s illusion by superimposing a photograph of Grable over a shot of Harry, who then turns into Grable. Stosh is in a trance until the hallucination wears off. When Stosh finally recognizes Harry as his dance partner, he bursts into tears.
“We are concerned about the scene in which Harry and Stosh dance together,” Breen declared in a letter. For starters, Breen was uncomfortable with Harry’s cross-dressing. “If there is any inference in the finished scene of a flavor of sex perversion, we will not be able to approve it under the Code.” Breen further thought that Stosh should not be crooning some bars of “I Love You” to Harry, nor should he call Harry “darling.” Breen was also unnerved by Stosh’s “snuggling” with Harry as they danced because it implied a hint of sexual pleasure on Stosh’s part.57
Wilder promised to consider Breen’s suggestions carefully but not necessarily to implement them. Reportedly, Blum asked Wilder what he intended to do about the dance sequence, and Wilder replied, “Not a damned thing!” Truth to tell, the scene remained unchanged in the final shooting script, and Breen did not raise the issue again.58 After all, innuendo is a slippery target for a censor. Furthermore, Breen, who had held his office since 1930, was soon to retire and be replaced by his chief assistant, Geoffrey Shurlock. Perhaps because his time in office was running out, Breen was not as strict about implementing the censorship code as he had been in the past.
Wilder, with Blum’s aid, had turned out a fine screenplay, one that Wilder was proud of. Be that as it may, Edwin Blum, like Raymond Chandler before him, vowed never to collaborate with Wilder again. Blum regarded the writing role he had been assigned as “little more than a butler” or glorified stenographer. “My name is in the credits, but I don’t think of the script as mine. Oh, I made some important contributions,” especially in beefing up the characterization of Sefton. “When you work with Billy, he rules you a thousand percent. I know . . . the more he likes you, the more sarcastic he gets. But I couldn’t take the insults.” Blum recalled one of Wilder’s insulting diatribes: “My God, I have a cretin collaborating with me! You should listen to the rotten words he uses,” Wilder exclaimed to their fellow screenwriters at the writers’ table in the commissary. “Eddie, when I had Charlie Brackett as my partner, he came up with exquisite words. . . . He was a literate man, not an ignoramus like you.”59
Wilder never noticed his inconsistency in admitting that he needed a collaborator because “I speak lousy English” and criticizing Blum’s vocabulary. One day, when he was really fed up, Blum retorted, “Billy, you roar like a lion; but you got no teeth. All I feel is soft, flabby gums.”60 That shut Wilder up—for the moment, at least. Asked about Blum, Wilder responded, “I worked with him on the script of a very good picture, Stalag 17, but I never worked with him again.” In Wilder’s opinion, Blum did not make a significant contribution to the script.61 Like Chandler, Blum failed to mention when complaining about Wilder that Wilder kept him on salary throughout the production period and consulted him about script revisions along the way. This was an unusual courtesy for a screenwriter at the time.
In casting the picture, Wilder recruited some actors from the Broadway play, including Robert Strauss (Stosh) and Harvey Lembeck (Harry), who were priceless as the dimwitted prison pals. Wilder needed a major star familiar to the mass audience for Sefton; the studio at first urged Charlton Heston on Wilder. But Wilder eventually decided Sefton was too much of a conniving, hard-bitten hustler to be played by Heston, who normally played nobler types. Stalag 17 was ahead of its time in presenting an American soldier as an antihero, before it had become fashionable in the American cinema to present such a character in unflattering light. Wilder finally picked William Holden, who had become an important star after Sunset Boulevard. At first Holden rejected the role; he had attended the play in New York and walked out after the first act. He found the stage play dull and thought Sefton was merely a garden-variety con man. But Holden changed his mind when he read the script, in which Wilder and Blum had cleverly built up Sefton’s role and made him a heel who turns out to be a hero. With Stalag 17 Holden became Wilder’s favorite leading man. “My love will always be with Mr. Holden,” he said.62 Sig Ruman, a veteran of Ninotchka and The Emperor Waltz, played Johann Sebastian Schulz, a barracks guard who clowns around with the inmates at times (his favorite wisecrack to Harry is “Droppen sie dead!”). But Schulz is a lot slyer than he appears—he is in cahoots with the barracks informant.
Ernest Laszlo had served his apprenticeship as camera operator on The Major and the Minor and other films. Since then he had become a director of photography in his own right and had earned recognition for films like Rudolph Maté’s film noir D.O.A. (1950). He did so by achieving a more realistic look for the films he photographed, instead of the usual “soft, glossy visual style” of most Paramount films.63 As such, he was the perfect choice for Stalag 17. Laszlo’s atmospheric cinematography captured the sordid setting of a POW camp, utilizing deep grays and blacks in keeping with the somber dramatics.
The studio allocated a budget of $1,315,000 for Stalag 17, somewhat less than the budget for Ace in the Hole, but still adequate for Wilder’s needs. Wilder’s fee for coauthoring the screenplay and directing and producing the picture would be $250,000. The budget was sufficient to allow the production staff to build Wilder his very own prison camp for filming exteriors at Snow Ranch in Calabasas, California, forty miles northwest of Hollywood. Production designers Franz Bachelin and Hal Pereira constructed wooden shacks and barracks for the prisoners, along with gun turrets and observation towers for the guards.
The weatherman predicted plenty of rain in Calabasas during February 1952, when Wilder would be shooting there for ten days. That guaranteed gray skies and acres of mud, which contributed to the bleak landscape of the camp. All in all, Wilder was successful in creating the degraded atmosphere of the prison compound. When the viewer sees the mud and lice that are so characteristic of a prison camp, it is difficult to believe that the film was shot almost entirely in a Hollywood studio and on a ranch in Southern California.
Principal photography began on February 2. Preminger, with his thick German accent, was central casting’s concept of a Nazi. He had a reputation for berating cast and crew at the top of his voice on the set. He once endeavored to put a nervous actor at ease by glaring at him nose-to-nose and hollering, “RELAX!” On the first day of shooting Stalag 17, Preminger was fidgety about appearing in front of the camera for the first time in a great while. As a prank, Wilder pasted his face against Preminger’s and shouted, “RELAX!” Only Wilder could have gotten away with that. One actor noted that Preminger was parodying himself in Stalag 17. He added that the commandant whom Preminger played was “Otto on a good day.”64
Preminger told me, “I had trouble remembering my lines.”65 Wilder recalled that, when Preminger forgot a line, “he would get very embarrassed and say he was rusty because he hadn’t acted in so many years. So he said he would send me a pound of caviar every time that he had a day when he blew his lines. Well, several pounds of caviar arrived for me in the course of shooting that film, but Preminger gave a fine performance.” Wilder said elsewhere, “Directors are not difficult to direct, because they remember the problems which they have had with their actors when they are directing. As a result, they will bend over backward to be helpful.”66
Wilder could be as stubborn as a Prussian general in dealing with the studio brass. He was summoned by the front office and advised that it was improper for Stosh and a couple of the other prisoners to be wearing filthy underwear. He was told that he must stop having the men “running around looking so dirty.” Wilder responded with acrimony: “Like hell I will! I will close down the picture, and you can have somebody else do it.”67 The men wore their grungy union suits for the rest of the movie.
Holden occasionally lost his patience during shooting. The actors who had appeared in the stage play had developed a camaraderie, and they sometimes indulged in boisterous horseplay between takes. Wilder did not mind, but it irked Holden, who finally snapped one day and yelled, “Goddammit! Can’t you guys shut up for a minute? Some of us are trying to get some work done!”68 Strauss and the others who were making a commotion were startled by the scolding and complied. Holden took his role very seriously indeed. He was uneasy about the fact that Sefton was trafficking in blackmarket goods with the Nazi guards. Holden wanted the audience to like Sefton because he wanted them to like him. “Could I have a line or two that shows that I really hate the Germans?” Holden implored Wilder. But Wilder refused. Sefton was “an unsentimental opportunist,” he explained to Holden. Otherwise he could not have been so successful in conning the guards and the other prisoners with his crooked deals.69
Some sources say that Holden did not become a problem drinker until he was making The Bridge on the River Kwai on location in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1956. But Gil Stratton said that he noticed Holden occasionally taking a nip from a flask when he was off the set. Holden sometimes appeared on the set with dark circles under his eyes and was a little unsteady, indicative of a night of drinking.
Because all the action of the film takes place in and around barrack 4, the central set, the scenes in the script could be shot in sequence. In this manner the actors could develop their roles as the plot evolved. As the shooting progressed, Wilder fell five days behind schedule, largely because heavy rains caused delays at Snow Ranch. In addition, Wilder and Blum had continued to revise the script scene by scene throughout the shooting period. They had on occasion gotten behind, and this held up the shooting. Don Hartman, who had followed Buddy De Sylva as head of production at Paramount, finally decreed that Wilder had one more week to finish shooting. Wilder announced that he was finished with rewrites, and he promised to shoot the remaining scenes with maximum efficiency during the last week of filming. Cast and crew agreed to make up for lost time by shooting on three nights until the wee hours of the morning. The production wrapped on March 29, 1952, almost on schedule. Wilder brought the film in for $1,661,530; the front office decided that this was close enough to the original budget, $1,315,000, and did not complain.
During the shooting period, Wilder and supervising editor Doane Harrison, along with the film’s editor, George Tomasini, worked out a plan whereby, through careful editing and artful tracking shots, the tempo of the film would never drag, even though much of the action is concentrated in the narrow confines of barrack 4. Hence the final editing of the movie during postproduction went along briskly. This was the only film Tomasini edited for Wilder; he went on to edit seven pictures for Alfred Hitchcock.
Franz Waxman was on hand to compose another score for a Wilder film. Wilder’s instructions to Waxman were simple: “Main title and end music; and in certain sections a drum only.” Wilder did allow for source music, as in the Christmas party scene, in which Waxman approximated a dance band playing popular songs that were ostensibly coming from the barracks phonograph. Waxman was in complete accord with Wilder in relying primarily on percussion for the background music throughout the film. Percussion instruments by themselves, Waxman noted, can sound very sinister and menacing in a melodramatic movie about prisoners of war.70
During the opening credits, a military band plays “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” featuring brass, snares, and a glockenspiel. The march music accompanies a tracking shot of a Nazi guard with a German shepherd patrolling along a high wire fence. As the story gets under way, it is clear that Stalag 17 is essentially a whodunit. Sefton must finger the Nazi informer masquerading as an American prisoner if he is to quell his fellow inmates’ suspicions about him—they call him a “kraut kisser.”
Wilder injects some neat humor into the melodrama to keep the movie from becoming too grim. In Trzcinski’s cameo as Triz, he insists on washing his socks in the same kettle in which the inmates’ potato soup is boiled, despite their vigorous protests. Even Preminger does a comic turn. Commandant von Scherbach is traipsing around his office in his white silk socks while he interrogates Dunbar, who has been convicted of an act of sabotage. The commandant phones one of the high command in Berlin at one point. While waiting for the call to go through, he has his orderly help him put on his cumbersome black boots so that his superior officer can hear his heels clicking together as he stands at attention. After he hangs up, he has the orderly remove the boots. Wilder was proud of this gag.71
Sefton continues his efforts throughout the movie to uncover the real traitor lurking in the barracks. As luck would have it, Sefton quite by accident secretly notices Price, one of the inmates, smuggling a message to a Nazi officer. Sefton subsequently unmasks Price before his fellow inmates; they sheepishly admit that they scapegoated him. Having redeemed himself in the eyes of his fellow prisoners, Sefton then volunteers to secretly escort Dunbar out of the camp before the commandant can have him executed for sabotage. Sefton is about to follow Dunbar through the trapdoor in the barracks floor, which leads to the escape tunnel that will take them out of the compound. Before Sefton descends, Andrew Sarris writes, Sefton “bids a properly cynical adieu to his prison camp buddies”: “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let’s pretend we never met before.” But Wilder judged Sefton’s parting words to be too spiteful, so he later added a shot of Sefton popping back up through the trapdoor “with a boyish smile and a friendly salute; he then ducks down for good.”72
In a chilling scene, the other prisoners arrange a condign punishment for Price. They wait until dark and force him out of the front door of the barrack, right into the glare of the searchlights in the prison yard. The Nazi guards mistake him for a prisoner who is attempting to escape and immediately gun him down. Afterward the GIs lie back on their bunks. Cookie begins to whistle “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” a reprise of the march employed in the opening credits. Then, as Jay Nash and Stanley Ross write, “a full orchestra picks it up and thunders triumphantly at the finish.”73
Audiences found Wilder’s adroit mixture of raucous comedy and spinetingling melodrama very entertaining. The movie is studded with many sharp, earthy one-liners and is also a masterful, gripping motion picture. After a successful advance screening hosted by Paramount in May 1953, the picture opened to enthusiastic notices when it was released nationwide in July. Stalag 17 grossed $10 million in its first six months of release, making it Wilder’s biggest hit for Paramount so far. The studio had warned Wilder that Stalag 17 had to earn a profit to wipe out the deficit left over from Ace in the Hole. Stalag 17 did in fact make enough money to cover both movies.
At the Academy Award ceremony on March 25, 1954, William Holden, who shrewdly underplayed the role of Sefton, won an Oscar for his assured performance. Holden’s wife, Ardis, who was by all accounts a shrew, told him, “Well, you know, Bill, you really didn’t get the award for Stalag 17,” in which she felt his performance was only adequate. “They gave it to you for Sunset Boulevard.”74 According to Sam Staggs, “Holden’s life had begun already to assume the lineaments of The Lost Weekend”; he drowned his resentment toward his wife in drink at an Oscar party.75 He was still seething when they arrived home. The inebriated Holden missed the driveway and plowed into a lamppost, tearing a fender off his Cadillac. He woke the next morning, still wearing his tuxedo and sitting in an easy chair, with his golden statuette in his lap.76
Wilder was nominated for best director but lost to Fred Zinnemann, who won for From Here to Eternity. Wilder did not mind losing to his old friend. By the time of Stalag 17, some of the promising young filmmakers who got their start on Menschen am Sonntag had fallen on dark days. Robert Siodmak’s Hollywood career was faltering, and he would soon reverse course by returning to Germany to make pictures. Edgar Ulmer had never risen above making low-budget program pictures for the cost-conscious independent studios collectively known as Poverty Row (where Billy’s brother Willie had also wound up). Only Wilder and Zinnemann were still thriving in Hollywood.
The German censorship board banned Stalag 17 from being exhibited in Germany in 1953. (A Foreign Affair had likewise been banned in Germany in 1948; it remained so until 1977.) In 1956 Wilder received a letter from George Weltner, the Paramount executive in charge of worldwide distribution, indicating that the film could be released in Germany—provided that, when the dialogue was dubbed into German, the spy hiding among the prisoners “is not a Nazi, but a Polish prisoner of war” who has sold out to the Nazis. Wilder replied to the Paramount high command, “Fuck you, gentlemen! You ask me, who lost my family in Auschwitz, to permit a change like this? Unless somebody apologizes,” Wilder said, he would never make another film for Paramount. “I never heard anything from Paramount,” Wilder concluded; “no apology, no nothing.”77 For the record, Stalag 17 was not altered when it was released in Germany in 1960.78 It was well received by the press and public there. Wilder himself was pleased with the movie. “Along with Sunset Boulevard, it is one of my favorites,” he declared unequivocally.79
With Stalag 17, Wilder had made a successful Broadway play into an equally successful movie. By so doing, he had been reinstated as a major player at Paramount. For his next project, he chose another promising Broadway play, Sabrina Fair, which he would bring to the screen as Sabrina, a romantic comedy with Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and, once again, William Holden. But at this point Wilder had been associated with Paramount for sixteen years, and he was growing restless.