a.k.a. The Big Carnival
company: Paramount Pictures
year: 1951
runtime: 112′
country: United States
director: Billy Wilder
cast: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling,
Robert Arthur, Porter Hall
writers: Billy Wilder,
Lesser Samuals, and Walter Newmann
order this film from Amazon.com
The film-going world at large was not happy with director Billy Wilder come the 1951 release date of the film that is the focus of this review – at a time when American cinema was still largely considered to be escapist fair, the stark and tangibly gritty reality of ACE IN THE HOLE was a bit more than audiences could handle. The story of what happened from there is more or less well known – Paramount, in response to the very poor public reaction to the film, snuck it back into theaters in hopes that the somewhat happier title THE BIG CARNIVAL would attract more ticket sales. It didn’t. The film died at the box office – twice – and was condemned to obscurity by an understandably angry Paramount Pictures.
At the age of fourteen I was completely oblivious to the information above and, home for the summer and sitting out one of the last nights of peace before the remainder of my family returned from a vacation somewhere long since forgotten by myself, watching the television in the downstairs living room of our then-new home. It was late and choices were slim, so I took a chance on a film I’d never heard of that had been playing for roughly an hour already on the pre-sucks AMC network. I only recognized one cast member at the time – the ever present Kirk Douglas – but became quickly engrossed with what was left of the film just the same.
