Kirk Douglas played the villain in another key noir, Out Of The Past (1947), but his baddie here is altogether more chilling and compelling. Chuck Tatum is a hard-boiled reporter down on his luck who washes up in Alberquerque riding in his brokendown car hauled by a pick-up truck like a chariot.
After insulting the editor of the local rag, Jacob Q Boot (Porter Hall), he gets a job that he doesn't want, but having no money to pay for his car repairs, he has to stay anyway.. for two years.
By now, he's ropeable, so the editor sends him out of the office to a rattlesnake festival two hours away. En route, he stops at a tiny place called Escuando, and hears that local miner has got stuck underground, hunting for Indian pottery.
Sniffing a story, Chuck blags his way into the mineshaft and finds Leo, his leg trapped under a rockfall. But Leo Minosa (Richard Benjamin) seems more concerned that his violating Indian ghosts has brought about the collapse.
But to Chuck, this is his story, and he calls it in, creating what we now call 'a media frenzy'. Back then they called it a circus. Soon a vast carnival has assembled under the New Mexico sky. Chuck is in cahoots with the local sheriff (Ray Teal) who is seeking re-election and both decide to build the story. They persuade a reluctant Smollet, the mining engineer, (Frank Jacquet) to take the long way in to rescue the marooned Leo, and his fate is sealed. Seven days later they have a nationwide headline story, and a dead miner on their hands.
Chuck gets his comeuppance when he tries to start acting morally. His attempt to remonstrate with Leo's disenchanted wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling) end in disaster.
Billy Wilder's film is a noir under a clear sky, a thriller that becomes a satire, a satire without any laughs, and a more bitter indictment of the modern media than Citizen Kane or Network. Long neglected, the film is at last available on Criterion in a deluxe edition with a long interview with Wilder on the second disk. Halfway through the movie, I had a flashback to the last time I saw the film, in a Welsh kitchen in 1986 as a first year student, and the film seems more disturbing now than it did then, for the cynical coercive mediua stuntmen, the spin-meisters have done much worse since.