Being a cynical journalist, I was eager to watch “Ace in the Hole,” the 1951 Billy Wilder film about a manipulative reporter named Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas) who will do anything for a big story. The film flopped at the time of its release and was largely forgotten, but last year Criterion Home Video rescued “Ace in the Hole” from oblivion and made it available for the first time on DVD.

It’s easy to see why audiences avoided this film. There isn’t a single likable character in it, except maybe the publisher of the Albuquerque newspaper where Douglas goes to work. Of course, the publisher is portrayed as something of an out-of-touch rube; when Tatum glances at a cross-stitched sign in the newsroom that says “Tell the Truth,” he mocks the whole concept of telling the truth, but gets hired anyway. (I’ll try this tactic the next time I apply for a job and let you know how I fare.) He simply can’t believe he has to work in a little backwater like Albuquerque, but that’s what getting fired from 11 newspapers will do for you.

One day, Tatum is sent to cover a rattlesnake competition, and stumbles across a hot story: A local man is trapped in a mine. Sensing that he has a huge story on his hands, Tatum takes charge of the scene. He convinces the local sheriff to feed him information, but freeze out the army of reporters he predicts will descend upon the scene. The miner’s wife is an unhappy, bitter woman who has decided to leave her husband, but Tatum convinces her to stick around and get rich off the tourists who soon flock to the site. When the leader of the rescue team describes a fairly simple, quick process for accessing the trapped miner, Tatum convinces him to take a different route that will delay the rescue effort and, in doing so, make Tatum, who wishes for nothing more than a triumphant return to the New York media market, a star. I like an actor who isn’t afraid to play a complete scumbag, and Kirk Douglas is great as Tatum. I don’t think his jaw has ever been wired tighter.

Being a Billy Wilder film, “Ace in the Hole” has great dialogue that sounds like it could have been written yesterday. When Tatum tells a young protege, “Bad news sells papers because good news is no news,” I recalled a member of my college newspaper staff making a similar observation: “When the lead story’s positive, that’s not good.” We loved this comment so much we typed it up and hung it on the wall.

“Ace in the Hole” is an acid indictment of a sensationalist media culture that turns emotional stories about children trapped in wells and missing teenage girls into cause celebres while ignoring broader, complicated issues. But it’s an indictment of the public, too, which might account for why nobody went to see this movie when it was released. It portrays the crowds that flock to the accident site as, at best, gullible fools, and, at worst, voyeurs who find this human tragedy perversely entertaining. The sleepy desert town transforms into a circus, both literally and figuratively — the film was originally titled “The Big Carnival” — and by the end of the movie you’re so disgusted with everybody you feel like taking a shower. When Tatum (SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW THE MOVIE ENDS!) marches into the newspaper office, collapses and dies, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I don’t think I’ve ever been on the scene of a story with anyone quite like Tatum, since I don’t work for a slimy tabloid and I don’t spend my days chasing Britney Spears around waiting for her to do something stupid. But it’s true that reporters become very single-minded when they’re pursuing a good story. For me, reporting involves striking a delicate balance: I want people to talk to me and tell me about their lives, but I don’t want to exploit them. (It goes without saying that I would never delay the rescue effort of a trapped miner.) There’s room for compassion in journalism, but not in the world depicted by “Ace in the Hole.” Tatum, I’m sure, would scoff at such a sentiment.

My favorite Billy Wilder movie: “Stalag 17.” I see that M. Night Shyamalan, the once-wunderkind director of “The Sixth Sense,” has a new movie out. Remember when an M. Night Shyamalan movie was this big event? I saw “The Sixth Sense” when it opened, and liked it a lot; I felt it deserved its word-of-mouth success. I liked Shyamalan’s follow-up, “Unbreakable,” too. But I couldn’t handle “Signs,” and “The Village” made me roll my eyes. In these films, Shymalan seemed to be straining for some sort of Deep Meaning about The World We Live In, at the expense of coherence and thrills, and I wish he’d stop trying to be important and just make a proper B-movie. In any case, I have no plans to see his latest, “The Happening,” which opened last week. But if it’s any good, let me know, and I’ll rethink my position.

Looking for a dry romantic comedy about a socially inept ventriloquist and his dysfunctional family? You could do worse than “Dummy,” a 2003 movie starring Adrien Brody before he won the Oscar for “The Pianist.” It includes a surprising amount of klezmer-punk music, which I considered a real treat.