Okay, I've sent you towards enough bad movies lately. Let me make it up to you by recommending a great one. Wednesday evening, Turner Classic Movies is running Billy Wilder's rarely-seen masterpiece, The Big Carnival. When Wilder made it, it was called Ace in the Hole but the studio didn't like that title. They apparently didn't like the movie, either, and it was released under a couple of other names, as well.
You're going to have to get yourself in the right frame of mind for this one because it brings on-screen cynicism to a new peak. Almost everyone in the film is slime, especially Kirk Douglas in the lead. He plays a rotten-to-the-core reporter who doesn't believe in letting minor things like truth or other folks' lives get in the way of a hot, career-advancing story. His tactics got him booted out of mainstream journalism and exiled to a small-time newspaper in New Mexico. While there, he happens upon a mining accident and decides to hype it into the news story of the year. Given what's happened with cable news the last few years, with the exploitation of O.J. and Jon Benet and Condit and all the rest, it's amazing no one thought to remake or even rerun Wilder's prescient movie.
But no. It's been hard to find. There have been a few home video releases, not necessarily legal. If it's run on TV in the last decade or so, I managed to miss it. The tape I have is from a broadcast so long ago that it's full of commercials for defunct products.
The one time I met Wilder, I asked him about the film but he didn't want to discuss it. It was a painful memory, a failed project, a movie for which he'd received undeserved grief. He'd talk at length about The Apartment but not about The Big Carnival (or, as he called it, Ace in the Hole). He didn't even want to hear me tell him that it would someday be hailed as a classic. The only real thing he did say was that the studio wanted him to put a happy ending on it, which proved they didn't understand it one bit. It's one of those films where the only conceivable happy ending is that you walk out when it's over and think, "Thank God that didn't happen to me." And then you go home and take a couple of showers to try and wash off the general smarminess.
This article by Bruce Bennett will give you more background on the film and the real-life tragedy that inspired it. But if you've never seen the film, maybe you'd be wise to wait and read nothing more about it before you do. And for God's sake, don't watch it when you're in a good mood you don't want to spoil.