THE WAGES OF FEAR (Le Salaire de la Peur) B+
France Italy (131 mi) 1953 French restoration (156 mi) Director’s Cut (148 mi)
d: Henri-Georges Clouzot
In the manner of GREED (1924) or THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), this is a film that pits men against their most primal instincts, themselves, pitiless victims who are tragically unable to control their baser instincts, set against a larger canvas of enveloping darkness that is all but waiting to envelop them—capitalism. Like an entryway to Hell, the film opens in a godforsaken, backwater town in the middle of nowhere, supposedly somewhere in South America, a place one could legitimately call the end of the road, filled with penniless, out-of-work men, mostly European exiles with expired or non-existing visa’s lining the streets desperate for money and a ticket out of there, instead sitting on their hands in a kind of involuntary purgatory of the down and out, a way station where there’s no telling how long they’ve been stuck there like prisoners. Set in two parts, where the initial scenes have the claustrophobic feel of men continually getting on each other’s nerves, a hopeless and monotonous life where day after day nothing ever changes, where perhaps the only consolation is the pretty barmaid, played of course, by the director’s wife Véra Clouzot (actually born in Brazil), the object of every man’s desires, yet continually mistreated by the sleazy bar owner who treats her like property and Mario (Yves Montand), who she actually cares for. When a white-suited big shot from Paris arrives into town, Mr. Jo (Charles Varnel, penniless like the rest of them), milking it for all it’s worth, as yet to be exposed as a fraud, he strikes up a friendship with Mario, as they are both French con men at heart.
What transpires next is the kicker, as a seedy representative from an American oil company arrives with armed guards and is looking to hire experienced truck drivers for a delicate mission hauling 200 gallons of highly explosive nitroglycerin over 300 miles of rocky, mountainous terrain. It seems a handful of men have already died and nearly a dozen more injured in a massive oil rig fire, a little known fact the company wants kept secret to avoid a public relations disaster. More to the point, a.) the oil company has trucks but no shock absorbers or safety equipment, b.) nitroglycerin is highly unstable and explodes if shaken or spilled, but c.) is needed to put out the oil rig fire, as a carefully induced explosion can suck the oxygen out of the fire. Oh, and the company is willing to pay $2000 to any man who can deliver the goods without getting blown to bits. Despite being a suicidal mission, every man in town lines up for the job and are angry about being turned away. The company hires four drivers for two trucks, a Corsican (Yves Montand), a Parisian (Charles Vanel), a German (Peter Van Eyck) and an Italian (Folco Lolli), where those turned away are angry, knowing this is their only ticket out of town, where one of the rejected drivers commits suicide while another may be murdered so that the Parisian can take his place. From the outset, it’s a dirty business where you have to resort to any means just to have a chance to get yourself killed, and with luck, survive. The trucks pull out in the dead of night, where what follows is a highly charged suspense thriller where the director delights in placing unforeseen obstacles in their path, upping the ante in exposing just what men are willing to do for the money.
Turning into a truck lover’s dream, where we follow trucks and nothing but trucks for the last hour and a half, where at any moment catastrophe awaits, this also becomes a battle of nerves and wits that plays out in the minds of the drivers. Sitting in the self-enclosed driver’s seat, the conversation resembles an existentialist play like Sartre’s No Exit, as you can’t predict what’s in the twisted minds of these desperados, where both sets of drivers maniacally push the other to the limit, introducing daredevil tactics that only tighten the screws of the already unbearable tension, as they continually tempt death throughout the journey. Adapted by Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi from the novel by Georges Arnaud, this is a nailbiter of a movie, unusual for the adventure format as mostly nothing happens, but the anticipation cleverly instilled in the audience’s minds is searingly intense. The bravado of the men comes into play, where Montand turns into a kind of reckless hotshot as his partner Vanel wilts under pressure, visualizing every rock and crevice along the road, while the other pair barely know one another at the outset and are highly suspicious, refusing to be undermined by the other’s lack of will or sheer incompetancy, but become fast friends, brought closer together by sharing the danger and the difficulty, where they eventually learn to respect each another. Not so Montand and Varnel, where they are continually at odds with one another. Overwhelmingly bleak and exhausting, the fatalistic atmosphere of doom is everpresent, stuck in one of the more barren landscapes ever devised for a film, occasionally broken up by moments of levity, where a nice touch thrown into the mix is Clouzot’s incessant use of cigarettes, as these guys continually light up in front of such volatile explosives, much like casually smoking around a gas pump, where any spark could set off a massive explosion. And in this artificially devised waiting game, Clouzot does not disappoint.
