Ace in the Hole

Ace in the Hole (1951) is Billy Wilder's savage media drama you can watch online on iFILM. Kirk Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a burnt-out big-city reporter exiled to a small New Mexico paper after one too many scandals, hungry for any story that'll get him back to the front page.

He finds it underground. Leo Minosa is trapped in a collapsed Native American mine shaft, and Tatum sees not a rescue mission but a career resurrection. He quietly conspires with the local sheriff to slow down the rescue, drags out the drama, and watches a circus spring up around the dig site — food stalls, tourists, a carnival ride — while Leo suffocates below.

Wilder meant it as a broadside against yellow journalism, but the film has only grown more unsettling with time. There is not one figure here you can root for, and the whole machine runs on the audience's own appetite for spectacle. Douglas delivers a performance of cold, calculated menace that he never quite topped. Watch Ace in the Hole (1951) online on iFILM.