Mark Metcalf, co-owner of Libby Montana restaurant in Mequon, is an actor known for his work in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects.

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com.

This week, Metcalfe weighs in on "Ace in the Hole," "Once" and "The Hoax."

ACE IN THE HOLE (1951)
Many people do not like to watch movies that are in black & white. I don't understand why, unless it's simply because they are used to color and think black and white is going backwards or something like that. That's like not reading history because it took place in the past. Duh ... If you cut yourself off from black and white films, you miss out on 50 percent of the movies ever made. More importantly, you miss many of the great filmmakers that ever lived. Filmmakers that any filmmaker of today will easily admit they learned from; filmmakers like Billy Wilder.

Wilder is really one of the great moviemakers, a maker of popular entertainment. It seems as though people think of "pop culture" as a thing that exists right now, with no history or tradition. Shakespeare was pop culture, so were Aeschylus and Sophocles. Just because they are perceived as high brow now doesn't mean that the people who went to see them back then were any brighter, smarter or more cultured than we are now.

Madonna and Sarah Bernhardt probably have more in common than we like to think. We put ourselves down by thinking that pop culture is thin, light stuff that only lasts a few moments and then is forgotten. Movies like "The Apartment," "Some Like It Hot," "Sunset Boulevard," "Stalag 17," "Witness For the Prosecution," "Irma La Douce," "Double Indemnity" and this one, that I had never heard of before, "Ace In the Hole," are popular entertainment at its best.

Because they were made before most of you were born, they are somehow historical and that makes them not worth the effort. However, it's like my son and spinach, if you haven't tried it, how do you know you don't like it?

The Kirk Douglas performance in the center of "Ace in the Hole" is a little overbearing, as all Kirk Douglas performances are, but don't let that spoil it. The script and the story, which Wilder wrote, as he did everything he directed, are worth the grins that Douglas forces out of you. I just kept imagining Tom Cruise in the part and it made it easier. Tom Cruise is the Kirk Douglas of today: overeager, over-amped and over-developed in the jaw.

It's the story of a washed up journalist who stumbles on a story in New Mexico, a story of a man trapped in a cave. The journalist dries out long enough to promote the story, turns it into a media circus, becomes a star again, then gets a conscience just in time to fall down dead right in our laps.

The sex between Jan Sterling and Douglas is at a distance but the desert heat is there, along with the desire and the desperation. She wants him, but he is to busy manipulating to be anything more than violent. It's a great story and Wilder lets the little two-pump gas station and diner in the desert grow to become the midway for one man's demise and then has it all disappear with the wind in an instant. It is deliberate and it is surprising.

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