In Sunset Boulevard the Brackett-Wilder team took an outsize, legendary character, examined her coldly and ironically—but did not destroy her legendary quality. Billy Wilder, now on his own, does rather the same, in a very different setting, in the hard and brilliant Ace in the Hole….

The technique, in contrast to the leisurely, personal style of Sunset Boulevard, is one of impersonal, direct observation…. Wilder isolates individuals not in distracting asides from the main theme, but to provide an added, sharpened comment on the mass….

The relative failure of the ending is an illustration of Wilder's limitations. His is a talent which one respects rather than likes. This is not the result of his choice of subject, nor of his occasional tendency to vulgarity (A Foreign Affair) or to sensationalism for its own sake (The Lost Weekend); it is because he seems to lack the powers of...