1951 – Kirk Douglas and Billy Wilder

Feel the Curse of the Seven Vultures

By Ernie Bulow

A couple of miles west of Manuelito there was a little two-story trading post called Lookout Point and it was perched in front of a giant stone alcove called Devil’s Cliff.  A few miles farther down the road a trader named Harry “Indian” Miller occupied a similar cave he called the Seven Devils; later it was home to Chief Yellowhorse.

Lookout Point Trading Post, taken over as a movie set.

The strip of 66 from Gallup into Arizona was once just one curio shop and gas station after another.  Most of the famous traders had a joint out there at one time or another – sometimes several.  Over in Arizona Leroy Atkinson had rented out his Box Canyon Trading Post and a flock of sheep during the making of “Grapes of Wrath.”  Leroy’s wife Wilmerine was related to Tobe Turpen Sr.

Wayne Russell said Lookout Point was once owned by the Kelseys of Zuni, then his mother Alma Sue Watson and her husband Dan ran the place until Dan hit the road.  Leroy Atkinson picked up the place for a song and had Alma Sue and her son run it for him.

When Kirk Douglas drives up to the place in 1951 a Navajo fellow tells him the place is the sacred Mountain of the Seven Buzzards.  A curse on the local Anasazi ruins has just claimed its latest victim, Leo Minosa, local curio trader and pot hunter.

The scene is in the cult classic Ace in the Hole, written, produced and directed by the inimitable Billy Wilder, who was fresh off the success of Sunset Boulevard and other classics, and soon to direct the magnificent Stalag 17.

Kirk Douglas had starred in two of his greatest films the year before, Glass Menagerie and Young Man with a Horn and would strike twice more in 1952 with The Big Sky and The Bad and the Beautiful.  Both actor and director were at the peak of their form and fame.

Ace in the Hole was widely criticized in the press and audiences stayed away in droves.  The studio retitled it The Big Carnival, but that didn’t help.  The film was universally reviled and didn’t begin to make back its nearly two-million-dollar budget.  The curse may have been a gimmick in the film, but it touched both Douglas and Wilder.

In the manic period following World War II perhaps the movie just seemed too un-American for viewers.  It also takes more than a few swipes at ordinary folks, stressing the hillbilly factor.

In spite of the fact that Douglas delivers a magnificently nuanced performance, and reveals redeeming quality in the end, critics panned the film on the grounds that it mocked the integrity of the media and badly portrayed a stupid, crooked sheriff.  Real Albuquerque radio and television stations are on the scene, by the way.

The Hollywood Reporter called it “a ruthless and cynical . . . distorted study of corruption and mob psychology . . .”  It works for me.  Just turn on the television set around five o’clock.

The movie, written by Wilder and two buddies, was based on the true story of Floyd Collins, a man who died in a cave-in in Kentucky.  The rescue attempt lasted for days and Floyd hung on long enough to win a reporter the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.  A sometimes scriptwriter named Victor Desny later claimed he owned the rights to Collins’s story.  He sued Wilder for plagiarism – and won!

Kirk Douglas in film Ace in the Hole, near Gallup.

To add insult to injury, the film did so badly Wilder didn’t get any of the profits from his next blockbuster, Stalag 17, the famous prison camp movie.  By then I’m sure he was feeling the curse of the seven vultures.

Ace in the Hole deals with a disgraced reporter way, way down on his luck when his car breaks down in Albuquerque.  (The scene looks a lot like Venice, California.)  Chuck Tatum, a fast talking, boozing, womanizer has been fired from all the major newspapers in the country.  He also admits to playing fast and loose with the truth, and makes fun of those who don’t.

He talks himself into a job and then suffers through a year of sheer boredom.  The opening scenes of the film are fraught with one-liners.  He tells the publisher, “I can handle big news and little news.  If there’s no news I’ll go out and bite a dog.”

He especially dislikes New Mexico, calling it a “sun-baked Siberia.”  The eternal shame of “No chopped chicken liver, no garlic pickles, no Madison Square Garden, no Yogi Berra.”  What’s wrong with New Mexico, he asks.  “Too much outdoors.”

One day his boss sends Chuck and a young photographer west to cover a rattlesnake hunt.  They stop at an isolated gas station called Minosa Trading Post.  Something is up when a local cop comes boiling down the road in a cloud of dust.  Route 66 may have been famous, but it wasn’t easy travel.

Leo Minosa has been excavating a cave behind a huge cliff dwelling.  Now he has been trapped deep underground by a cave-in.  Tatum smells a story.  He knows he’s really got something when the man tells him about the ancient Indian curse.  “Like that King Tut business.”  Tatum immediately sets about twisting the locals to his will.

Wife Lorraine, played by Jan Sterling, the ultimate bimbo, wants to escape her boring life of drudgery and dust.  The local sheriff is a mess and knows he doesn’t have a chance of being re-elected.  Tatum is a cold-blooded con man and makes them take the long way to rescue poor Leo.  The situation immediately draws a crowd of well-meaning gawkers and the news releases cover the country.

Concessions spring up, kids are all sporting made-in-Japan Indian head dresses, a carnival comes in and media people are crawling all over the place.  Sheriff Kretzer keeps the other reporters away from Tatum and the trapped man.

Unfortunately Leo isn’t as strong as Tatum thought, and catches pneumonia.  By then the cave is too unstable to allow a straightforward rescue and Tatum realizes what he has done.  To give the character credit, he feels guilty and goes after a priest for last rites, losing his chance to send off the big scoop that would revive his career.

Wifey Lorraine has a classic line:  “I don’t go to church.  Kneeling bags my stockings.”  She’s been getting a piece of all the action and has plenty of money to leave town.  As a parting shot she stabs Chuck Tatum in the gut with a pair of scissors before going out the door.

The boy scout photographer, Herbie Cook, has caught the bug and dreams of selling his photos to Life or Look. Tatum has corrupted everyone.  Interestingly the Film Code folks made Wilder write in a bit that showed Sheriff Kretzer coming to a bad end in the future.

During the filming Gallup folks were paid seventy-five cents an hour for a ten-hour day – three dollars more if they showed up with a car.  There is a scene where it looks like everybody in town was on the set.  Paramount left the fake ruins behind when they decamped, creating an instant tourist attraction.

A couple of years earlier Lookout Point had made the news when two buffalo escaped from another Atkinson place nearby.  The animals made the news for several days as they evaded capture.  Apparently they fell under the curse since they were eventually killed rather than recovered.  Later the famous trader Rex Bollin bought the post as a tourist attraction.

Chief Joe Deerfoot and Kirk Douglas share a laugh.

The film people, true to tradition, used the El Rancho as a base of operations.  At some point Kirk Douglas posed with local celebrity Chief Deerfoot – two entertainers having a laugh over something.

Two of my favorite Kirk Douglas films also have Gallup connections.  Douglas has said on several occasions that the 1962 picture Lonely Are the Brave, about a cowboy with no driver’s license or social security card, is his personal favorite out of nearly a hundred movies he has appeared in.  The film is based on Ed Abbey’s Lonely Are the Brave and was shot in Albuquerque, where Abbey had been going to school.

I have always loved the 1955 western Man Without a Star dealing with a complex cowboy who can’t sell out his integrity in the end.  This is a recurrent role for Kirk.  The film is loosely based on a novel by Dee Linford, father of Larry Linford.  In the ’50s Linford was a popular western pulp writer.  It is one of several films where Douglas sings and plays the banjo – rather well.

Even before Interstate 40 abandoned the old Mother Road and shifted traffic to the other side of the Rio Puerco, Lookout Point was hardly a memory any more.  There is almost no trace of the post, or the ambitious movie set that drew the whole town of Gallup.  Perhaps there was a curse on the place.

Ace in the Hole appears regularly on Turner Classic Movies.  Today’s critics dub it one of the greatest movies ever made.  I still enjoy it after all these years.