New to the Movies You Might Now Know list…
“Ace In The Hole,” a 1951 Billy Wilder classic with Kirk Douglas as reporter Chuck Tatum, who stumbles upon the story of Leo Minosa, a man stuck in a cave in a tiny New Mexico town. Seeing this as his opportunity to get back to the bigtime on a newspaper in New York, Tatum orchestrates what we now call a media circus. He not only manipulates the coverage of the story, but Minosa’s wife, the sheriff, the rescuers, and the public, too.
When you see it, think of all the stories that get blown out of proportion and exploited for days on end to fill the 24-hour info cycle on all those news networks. The parallels, more than half a century later, are remarkable.