In 1991, 11 years before his death at 96, the director Billy Wilder sat for a series of interviews with the German filmmakers Gisela Grischow and Volker Schlöndorff. The resulting footage (broadcast on German television as “Billy Wilder: How Did You Do It?”) was recently released by Kino International in a DVD package under a less translated-from-the-German title: “Billy Wilder Speaks.”

And speak he did. In rat-a-tat subtitled in German and English, Wilder energetically held forth on his life and filmmaking career in pre-war Europe as a protégé of Ernst Lubitsch and in post-war Hollywood as the famously successful director and co-writer of “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Seven Year Itch,” and “Some Like It Hot.” For the most part, Wilder remained lively, pithy, and garrulous about friends, rivals, collaborators, and the films they made. But he was curiously tight-lipped on the subject of perhaps his best picture.

Quizzed in German by Mr. Schlöndorff about 1951’s “Ace in the Hole,” which begins a week-long run tonight at Film Forum, Wilder merely offered a few words about the dubious character of the film’s protagonist (an amoral big city newspaperman trying to write his way out of a rural market), then spoiled the ending and dropped the subject.

Over the years, when “Ace in the Hole” came up in print interviews, Wilder was alternately defensive (“Among my pictures I think it was the runt of the litter.”), philosophical (“It’s about the price of people’s souls.”), and resigned (“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.”) about the picture. In “Billy Wilder Speaks” one gets the impression that the box office belly flop for “Ace in the Hole” (Wilder’s first) and critical mauling is just too much for the director to rationalize once again. For a man so justifiably in love with his own work, “Ace in the Hole” was the heartbreaking “one that got away.”

“Ace in the Hole” is loosely based on the newspaper hype and public reaction to a 1925 Kentucky mining accident and the bizarre 1949 tragedy of Kathy Fiscus, a 3-year-old girl who fell to her death in a Southern California well. Wilder’s story of opportunism and ambition is set around fictional efforts to free a man trapped in a subterranean New Mexican cave-in. Kirk Douglas, on loan from Warner Bros. and in his growling, stalking prime, plays Charles Tatum, a down-on-his-luck reporter who sees unlucky, unhappily married, and half-buried Leo Minosa’s (Richard Benedict) plight as his ticket back to the tabloid big time. With the cooperation of Leo’s hard bitten wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling, playing her part rock hard and dirt cheap) and the collusion of a crooked local sheriff facing a tough re-election (Ray Teal), Tatum persuades rescuers to tunnel the long way around to Leo so that he can spill every available ounce of human-interest ink on the rescue. As Tatum’s words hit the newsstands, hundreds of gawkers make the pilgrimage to the middle of nowhere souvenir stand, hotel, and diner that Leo and Lorraine operated between arguments. Lorraine rakes in the dough, charging the morbidly curious by the carload.

When Tatum’s copy hits the wire services, his old East Coast reporter rivals show up, notebooks in hand, and a former editor talks of putting the Park Row pariah turned prodigal golden boy back on the payroll. Eventually, the press circus becomes literally just that as carnival trucks (labeled “The S&M Amusement Company”) arrive, tents go up, and kids line up for cotton candy and a ferris wheel view of the mountain that’s just got to give up Leo safe and sound any day now.

It’s a testament to Wilder’s filmmaking acumen behind the camera and flair for caustic and smartly character-driven satire at the typewriter that not even a “Simpsons” parody of “Ace in the Hole” (Season 3’s “Radio Bart”) came close to the original’s valedictory relentlessness. Working with co-writers Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels, Wilder fashioned some of the most quotable, yet least known, lines of dialogue of his career. “I’ve met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time,” Lorraine spits at Tatum. “But you, you’re 20 minutes!”

“Ace in the Hole” is also a testament to Hollywood studio timidity. Executives at Paramount, hated the finished film so much that they did an 11th-hour title switch and defaced the picture with a bizarrely misleading new moniker, “The Big Carnival.” In doing so, they cursed “Ace in the Hole” to wander through film history not just underappreciated, but often misidentified. Paramount remained so bitter about the film’s minimal returns that when Wilder’s subsequent film, “Stalag 17,” hit box office paydirt, the studio deducted their “Ace in the Hole” losses from that film’s (and Wilder’s) profits.

Inside every cynic, they say, is a disappointed romantic. On the outside, Charles Tatum is both a Horatio Alger dynamo and a Nathanial West grotesque. But the inside that Mr. Wilder’s expertly pulpy direction (aided immeasurably by the cinematographer Charles Lang) and Mr. Douglas’s bruising performance reveals is something else completely.

Like Wilder, Tatum is himself a storyteller with a pitch-black view of human nature. As Tatum cons, cajoles, threatens, seduces, writes, and photographs all to shock and move the widest audience possible, he resembles a film director as much as a newspaperman. “Ace in the Hole” is less an indictment of the press than a map of the ethical minefield surrounding large-scale storytelling in any medium. Call it an auteurist exposé.

No wonder Billy Wilder took the mistreatment of his most personal film so much to heart. It may be the closest that the great writerdirector ever came to baring his creative soul on screen.

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