Watched: 11/22/2025
Format: Disc
Viewing: First
Director: Billy Wilder
If you ever wanted to crush the human soul with a pair of slick mid-century movies, you could do worse than to schedule this movie alongside The Sweet Smell of Success.
The movie probably seems a little over the top in some ways, but holy christ, you kind of know it's more accurate about our relationship with the media and how the media keeps us invested than any of us really want to admit.
Kirk Douglas plays a talented journalist who has been run out of every decent newspaper on the East Coast. He rolls into town in Albuquerque in a broken down car and takes a job at a small paper that insists he publish only the truth.
A year later, he's sent to go cover a rattlesnake roundup but en route stumbles across an accident. At a roadside shop and restaurant they find that across the way the owner of the place has gone into an old cave where he often finds Native American artifacts, and the place had collapsed on him. Douglas smells a story, and calls it in. It's the first time he's really been able to cut loose with some real sensationalism, and the story gets picked up by the wire.
The victim's wife (Jan Sterling) had one foot out the door, but she sees the angle as people begin flooding in, looky-loos and gawkers, and she stands to make a quick buck feeding people and letting them come see the sights for a quarter a spectator.
But Douglas knows you have to milk these stories, and so works to slow the rescue efforts, while playing up his friendship with the victim, whose wife is starting to throw herself at Douglas.
SPOILERS
With the Sheriff seeing the news story as a chance at publicity, he supports Douglas in pushing for drilling down to the cave rather than just shoring up the cave and pulling the guy out.
Soon, they have an ad hoc tourist attraction that just keeps expanding. From a few people coming to see what they read in the paper to a literal carnival is setting up outside, with hundreds of cars full of people turning up to be near the story. A circus tent is erected, carnival rides for the kids... it's insane.
And then Leo, the victim, starts getting sick. And Douglas finds out he can't just default to the original plan.
For those of us old enough, it's not hard to remember the rescue of "Baby Jessica", which was the first full-blown media circus like this I really remember. And if you don't remember, 18-month old Jessica McClure fell down a well? a hole? And was trapped for something like 2.5 days before they were able to rescue her. And every bit of televised media was providing updates, enough so that if you mention "the baby in the well" to anyone over 47, they know what you're talking about. (Baby Jessica is alive and well in West Texas, by the way.)
The movie is Billy Wilder. It's going to be good almost by default. And this is a perfect use of Douglas' almost predatory energy on screen.
It's utterly damning not just of the media and reporters and how they're incentivized to follow human interest stories, exploiting the subjects (Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, anyone?). It's damning of us, the rubs who can't look away, who can't make the connection between real lives and tragedies in play, and what we take in as "entertainment". And, so the press, then and now, is worth more (literally financially) if they can keep the story going as long as possible and keep everyone glued to the news to see the outcome. And if you don't have a full story at the outset, you can kind of make one up as you go along.
Parts of this movie have become so baked into how we think of media, stories much like this movie were the focus of, or part of, many movies through the 80's into the early 00's. These days we don't tend to reflect on our relationship with the news as part of our cultural conversation. Surely there's movies and TV shows out there very much about this, but good luck getting a critical mass to see them.
It doesn't mean cable news doesn't latch onto stories and run them into the ground - but these days it's gone from wide-reaching human interest to thinly veiled partisan nonsense.
Anyway, it's a super @#$%ing bummer of a movie. But well worth the watch.
No comments:
Post a Comment