One of many memorable lines ground between the teeth of Kirk Douglas, as the fallen journalist Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder’s brutally trenchant “Ace in the Hole,” is a faux-axiom: “Bad news sells best ’cause good news is no news.”

In 1951, when the film was released to critical brickbats and public indifference, Americans could remember when good news sold better than anything — from the summer of 1942, when the Allies began to turn the tide, through August 1945, when Japan surrendered unconditionally. Regular bouts of good news fueled the nation and, not least, the newspaper business.

Yet the big party, with strangers kissing in the streets and all that, was amazingly short-lived. Within a year, a psychological depression took up where the economic one left off, as the military looked for a new war, Churchill pointed to an iron curtain, atomic bombs blasted Bikini, communists were hunted in every shadow, and Hollywood, for the first time in 15 years, began releasing a slew of relentlessly caustic movies questioning the most vaunted principles of American life.

In the early 1930s, the Production Code helped to stem the surge of movies that questioned the national commitment to justice and morality. The postwar witch hunt attempted to do the same, but while it temporarily silenced or displaced many filmmakers, it couldn’t develop an actual code to prevent depictions of racism, organized crime, and adultery. Even if it could, the noir-ish overcast of the times was far less specific, pointing to a boredom, an ennui, a surfeit of material goods piled on top of hidden fault-lines and pitfalls.

Today, Criterion is releasing a new DVD edition of “Ace in the Hole” with all the bells and whistles, and it looks as fresh as a Jon Stewart montage of media high jinks. The “human interest story,” with which Wilder’s corrupt journalist hopes to spark America while rescinding his banishment from a New York newspaper, is news of a kind that is neither bad nor good. It is fake news, comic book news that everyone can follow — a week or two of “Paris Hilton Goes to the Big House” (if only Barton MacLane were alive to play the warden). The fact that two men wind up dead, murdered after a fashion, is almost beside the point. They have to die to fulfill the demands of the tale, but their deaths bring neither absolution nor — welcome to the 21st century — closure.

Credit Wilder for having the nerve to make a picture that isn’t subtle enough to qualify as un-American. It’s outright anti-American, but in a good equal opportunity way than can please neither the left nor the right — it doesn’t even acknowledge a left and right. Almost every character in “Ace in the Hole” is a heel, a crook, or a milquetoast; the best of the rest are merely superstitious. Within days of a disastrous premiere, Paramount withdrew prints in order to reopen the film with a more festive title, “The Big Carnival” — a moronic change, but not an inapt description of a movie that unfolds like a George Grosz exhibit brought to life.

As Chuck Tatum explains, the narrative he is about to weave is based on an incident that took place in 1925, when the failed attempt to rescue an explorer trapped in a cave attracted legions of tourists and won a Pulitzer for newspaperman Skeets Miller. When Tatum tells that story, his face is lit in a grotesque mask of greed, as if in homage to Erich von Stroheim. Tatum, a misanthropic alcoholic ( he doesn’t drink “much,” just “often”) stuck on a paper in Albuquerque, chances upon a similarly trapped explorer, Leo (Richard Benedict), a veteran who passes the time singing “The Hut Sut Song.” Like any good hack writer, alert to cliché and sentiment, he braids various details, including an ancient Indian curse and grieving parents, with his own inventions, among them the inadvertently homicidal insistence that it will take a week to dig Leo out.

Part of Tatum’s plot involves Leo’s presumably distressed wife, Lorraine, played with the precision of a diamond drill by Jan Sterling. But Lorraine is a bottle blonde of dance-hall provenance, eager to jump the first bus out of town until Tatum convinces her that she is sitting on a gold mine. Tatum sees in her sullen, slatternly smile the radiance of a gorgon, along with his own worst instincts. Wilder presses the point by giving her alarming close-ups as she closes in on Tatum, rousing a violence that will ultimately do him in.

Even less appealing is the bent sheriff, played by Ray Teal, who carries around a pet rattlesnake when the only rattler he has to worry about is Tatum. The sheriff is so repellant that Tatum scores points with the audience by roughing him up. But Tatum has no soft edges; even what appears to be a last-minute moral turnaround is subject to questions of motivation.

This is Mr. Douglas’s most authoritative and merciless performance, and Wilder toys with the actor’s volatility in having his character shown up by some of the people he otherwise dominates — the news kid Herbie (Bob Arthur) who verbally matches him, and the editor, Mr. Boot (nailed by Porter Hall), a weedy, yet impressively unimpressed man who appears in Tatum’s room alongside an oversize crucifix.

Wilder gives Tatum a singularly witty entrance and one of the most memorable exits in film history, but he doesn’t give the audience much intervening relief from the guy’s nastiness. In some respects, the faceless tourists who flock to the makeshift fairground are more revolting than Tatum and his stooges. One couple, the Federbers, is meant to represent them. Tatum calls them “Mr. and Mrs. America,” and Frank Cady, in the role of Mr. Federber, is the very image of the man in the painting “American Gothic.” The thoughtless Federbers underscore the predicament of hopeless entrapment — Leo in his cave, Lorraine in her marriage, and Tatum in Albuquerque. Only Lorraine walks off. The last we see of her, she has missed her bus and is begging for a ride, an indication of her future.

A decade earlier, Orson Welles filmed the story of a newspaperman who launched a war to sell papers: Nothing in “Ace in the Hole” was new or prophetic in 1951. Yet no other film, even those made much later, like “Absence of Malice” (1981) or “Broadcast News” (1987), speaks so directly to the low esteem in which the press is now held. It seems to predict a future filled with phrases like “feeding frenzy” and “news cycle.” At the time, “Ace in the Hole” seemed merely unfair and overstated. Wilder, not yet associated with ribald hilarity, was known chiefly for three of the darkest movies made between 1944 and 1950 — “Double Indemnity,” “The Lost Weekend,” and “Sunset Boulevard” — and even by those standards, “Ace in the Hole” crossed a line. After its failure, he kept his vitriol in check until 1964, when “Kiss Me Stupid” fared just as badly.

“Ace in the Hole” may be unfair, but it is hypnotic filmmaking, one of Wilder’s great achievements. The uncharacteristic aerial shots are magnificent, as are the contrasts between sun-drenched desert and foul cavern. Charles Lang’s cinematography and Hugo Friedhofer’s dissonantly descriptive score match the material. Criterion has done a munificent job in restoring an overlooked gem, complementing a stunning transfer with archival interviews of Wilder, Mr. Douglas, and co-scenarist Walter Newman, and a solid commentary track by Neil Sinyard. An especially charming “extra” is the booklet, which prints splendid essays by Molly Haskell and Guy Maddin as a four-page tabloid newspaper — a touch worthy of Wilder.

Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”