THE WAGES OF FEAR Movie Review
Le Salaire de la Peur
Four desperate men, stuck hopelessly in a desolate town in Central America, agree to be paid $2,000 each to drive two trucks filled with nitroglycerine over 300 miles of bumpy, decrepit mountain roads so that the nitro can be used to put out a raging oil-well fire. Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear is one of the greatest movie thrillers—and one of the most nerve-wracking experiences—of all time. The structure of the movie is genius. First, we learn what we need to about each of the men, who are played by Yves Montand, Folco Lulli, Peter Van Eyck, and Charles Vanel. The tension in their own lives and the despair that brought them to agree to such a situation is made palpable, and friction between them begins to develop as well. Then, they're paired off, put in their trucks, and hit the road. (Having two trucks is insurance. The company paying them thinks they'll be lucky if even one truck makes it without blowing up.) Clouzot has staged some sequences on cliffs, bridges, and washed-out roads (not to mention an encounter with a huge boulder) that are as agonizingly suspenseful as any moments in movie history, and they're stretched out almost beyond our ability to endure them. That's no accident; endurance and courage are exactly what The Wages of Fear is about. This is an amazing, shocking, visionary work, thrilling in ways we always hope suspense films will be, yet almost never are. After receiving the Grand Prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, The Wages of Fear was cut by more than thirty crucial minutes for its American release, and many of the prints in circulation in the late fifties were shorter still. In the 1980s, a fully restored, 138-minute version was finally released in the U.S., and it's available on video. (Beware of older, shorter, still-circulating public domain versions.) Yes, it was remade by William Friedkin as Sorcerer in 1977, and no, it's not nearly as good.
NEXT STOP … Diabolique, Juggernaut, Fires on the Plain
1955 138m/B FR Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck, Vera Clouzot, Folco Lulli, William Tubbs; D: Henri-Georges Clouzot; W: Henri-Georges Clouzot; C: Armand Thirard; M: Georges Auric. British Academy Awards ‘54: Best Film; Cannes Film Festival ‘53: Best Actor (Vanel), Best Film. VHS, LV HHT, SNC, VYY