We're revisiting the 1951 film year in the lead up to the next Supporting Actress Smackdown. As always Nick Taylor will suggest a few alternatives to Oscar's ballot.
Surely we all remember Jan Sterling from the excellent 1954 Smackdown, whose performance as an “anxious catfishing pioneer” in The High and the Mighty gave a misogynistic role one of the only moments of real pathos in the whole film. That disaster film was enough of a critical and box office success to justify her nomination, but much like Katy Jurado in Broken Lance and even Nina Foch in Executive Suite (who I love!) from the same lineup, the energy around Sterling’s nomination reeks more than a little of belated recognition.
In Sterling’s case, that missed opportunity came in 1951. Beford the National Board of Review introduced supporting categories to their own awards they handed her Best Actress for her supporting turn as a bored, opportunistic wife of a trapped man in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. But the mediocre reception Ace in the Hole received for its overt cynicism towards the noble professions of journalism and public service may have nixed her chances before category confusion could come into play. That's a shame since Sterling’s performance is absolutely essential to Wilder’s mix of jaded, mundane villainy and calculated entrepreneurship...
The unambiguous center of Ace in the Hole is Chuck Tatum, embodied by Kirk Dougas with ruthless, black-hearted machismo. Chuck enters the film sitting in his car and reading the local newspaper as it’s being towed down the main street of a New Mexico town. He’s looking for a job after drinking, cheating, and lying his way out of eleven major newspapers across the country, and the only place he can hope to get work is a tiny joint like the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. Chuck spends a year languishing in an uneventful job in a dull town, wasting his talent for sensationalism and staying sober the whole time. One day Chuck and a photographer half his age named Herbie (Robert Arthur) are sent to cover an annual rattlesnake hunt in some podunk town. Lucky for Chuck, they stumble across a horrible, suspenseful incident, and he begins calculating how to spin this into a tale that will return him to his former glories.
Sterling arrives unceremoniously into Ace in the Hole, coming sideways into the frame towards Chuck and Herbie’s car with a large, wrapped-up blanket and a giant tin of coffee. You wonder for a second if she’s a hitchhiker before she says she’s bringing supplies to some brouhahaha up on the mountain. She introduces herself as Lorraine, Mrs. Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), and tells Tatum her husband has once again gotten his sorry ass trapped in a cave-in while looking for ancient Native American artifacts which he sells off to support their flailing post/restaurant. This isn't the first time but it’s the deepest he’s ever been stuck.
Lorraine recites all of this to Chuck with bored disinterest. One might wonder if Lorraine is simply used to Leo getting stuck, but Sterling’s blasé dissatisfaction with the town and her husband’s business keeps us from assuming she’s being flippant. There’s no sense she’s concerned about whether he’ll make it out alive. The only time we see her smile is when she overhears Chuck dictating Leo’s story over her phone to some poor editor - Lorraine can already smell the incoming attention. Still, she tries to leave town the next day, travelling as far as $11 can take her. Chuck attempts to persuade Lorraine to stay with sentimental arguments, but she shoots down the very idea of caring for Leo, saying that suffering with no money in the middle of nowhere for five years of marriage is more than enough gratitude.
Lorraine counters that Chuck could give a shit about their marriage and only wants her around to sell a better story for his paper. So the reporter eventually convinces her to stay for one reason: money. The publicity from Chuck’s coverage of the accident will draw crowds big enough to make up for the past five years of one customer per day despair. Who wouldn’t want to show support for this trapped, devoted husband by supporting his business? Hell, there’s already people coming to watch the rescue effort. Lorraine listens to Chuck’s declaration without turning to face him until he’s walking away, and Sterling makes her fidgeting and heavy-lidded stare into a symphony of total anxiety as she internally debates if staying in this shithole for a few more days is worth the cash.
Yet Sterling plays all of this with offhand, minimalist control. Ace in the Hole thrives on contrasting the concentrated, utterly human bleakness of what its characters choose to do with a fairly unembellished style and scenario, especially by the standards of Wilder's previous film, Sunset Boulevard. Where Douglas keeps Chuck’s monstrousness coiled just enough to get what he wants, Sterling’s starchy, laconic behavior has no performative angle to speak of. Another actress might’ve pushed harder and more ostentatiously into embodying moral rot, but there’s no grotesquery to the hard edges Sterling gives Lorraine. I like that Sterling never hints whether Lorraine’s jaded veneer has been molded by her current unhappiness or if that's just how she’s always been. There’s no history to evaluate, no grounds to judge her on. She’s using Leo as much as the crowds of nobodies gawking at the mountain or the reporters hovering like vultures, but there’s a candor to her boredom and bitterness that separates her from the rest of them even as she takes on her own delusions of purpose and camaraderie.
It doesn’t take long for Chuck’s scheme to pay big dividends for Lorraine, whose shop is finally packed with customers from open to close. The next time he sees Lorraine in private she can't stop grinning. It’s a small grin, barely qualifiable as a smile, but Sterling’s face lights up tremendously anyway; this is the first time we see something behind her eyes besides antipathy, and it’s one of the only instances of happiness anyone expresses in the film. You can practically hear Hustler's Jennifer Lopez cooing “Doesn’t money make you horny?” in her ear, and the answer is an emphatic “yes” that Sterling opts to play with a soft, romantic air. There’s no distinguishing if she’s attracted to Chuck, his proficiency at his work, the lucrative business he’s brought her, or some jumbled mix that will all inevitably dissipate without the financial success he’s created for her. What’s more impressive is that Sterling makes this quiet joy unexpectedly stirring, conveying the sincerity of her feeling without suggesting Lorraine has softened in any real way. It makes you wonder how much loosening up this woman has in her, how tightly clenched she has to be to look so aggressively bored. As a result Sterling’s physical restraint elsewhere shines even more clearly as actorly control; it's a dissatisfied stuck character not a stiff actor failing to emote.
Chuck isn’t having this change in her demeanor. Their relationship will then shift violently and drastically in subsequent encounters, informed greatly by the developments surrounding Leo’s rescue and Chuck’s own prospects of success.
Lorraine isn’t given enough of a spotlight to contend with the likes of Wilder’s most canonized female characters, so it’s a testament to her own mettle as an actress that Lorraine emerges as such an intriguing figure in her own right, rather than just a pawn in Chuck's story. Sterling makes Lorraine’s appetites, displeasures, and ambitions come through in fine-grained expressions and gestures while pointing towards all the ways this woman has willfully closed herself off. Is there a better world waiting out there for her? Who knows. Unlike Gwyneth last month, I have a sad feeling this probably is the most exciting part of Lorraine’s life. But by the time she wanders out of Ace in the Hole, it’s hard to believe there’s anything left for her here, and harder still not to realize what an unexpectedly riveting character Sterling has made her.
Ace in the Hole is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and Amazon Prime, and is available for rental on most major services.