Six decades before Peepli, came the classic Ace in the Hole
It would be putting things very mildly to say that recent Hindi movies haven’t made journalists — TV journalists in particular — look good. The typical representation is one of shrill, parasitic cretins tripping over each other in a frenzy, exhibiting buffoonery as well as insensitivity as they thrust microphones into the faces of the unwilling.
A prominent example of this was Peepli [Live], in which van-loads of predatory reporters arrive at a small village on the scent of the TRP-rocketing “story” that a poor farmer has promised to kill himself. It was a portrayal of media both as an intrusive force in its own right and as an ugly reflecting mirror in which a middle-class society built on “traditional values” could see its darker, more primal face.
But the template for this sort of film is Billy Wilder’s 1951 masterpiece Ace in the Hole. Watching it again the other day, I found it hard to believe it was six decades old — the story, about a personal tragedy being turned into a media circus, was uncannily ahead of its time, and the film looks fresher and more relevant with each passing year.
To some extent, that’s true of most of Wilder’s work. His best movies are driven by acerbic screenplays that poke fun at just about any aspect of modern life that you can think of. But even by his standards, Ace in the Hole is unusually savage and bleak. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no happy ending, no bending to Hollywood norms about a lead character finding redemption.
In a film currently playing in theatres, Michael Douglas reprises the role of the ruthless and cold-blooded Wall Street trader Gordon Gecko. But old-time movie fans will know that few actors could portray single-minded, obsessive characters as well as Douglas’s father Kirk. In Ace in the Hole, the senior Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a down-on-his-luck reporter who realises he has the story that can help him get back to the top of his profession: a tourist guide named Leo has been trapped inside an old cave; will he be saved, and how long will it take?
“I don’t make the news, I only report it,” Chuck says defensively at one point, but we see him manipulating events for his own benefit —even to the extent of coercing the rescue-operation team to use an unnecessarily time-consuming method. Some scenes are spine-chilling: during a conversation with the trapped man, when Chuck discovers that the cave was an ancient Indian burial ground, his eyes gleam and become animated; you realise he’s less concerned with Leo’s plight than with the tantalising headline of the next day’s paper.
The response of most American film reviewers — who were, after all, journalists themselves — to Ace in the Hole was revealing. They denounced it as being too cynical (“not only a distortion of journalistic practice but something of a dramatic grotesque,” one wrote). The general public, not enthused by the film’s portrayal of their own voyeuristic urges, gave it the thumbs down too, and it was rarely seen until a couple of decades ago. Its reputation has revived since then and many now consider it Wilder’s best work.
In contrast, the response to Peepli [Live] has been positive from the outset. You’d have to be a hopeless optimist to think that this will result in more responsible TV news (the pressure of filling 24 hours while competing with a dozen other channels is much too strong), but I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes a few young journalism students think twice about the profession they are aspiring towards.
[Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer]
