| The Wages of Fear | |
|---|---|
 Promotional poster | |
| Directed by | Henri-Georges Clouzot |
| Screenplay by | Henri-Georges Clouzot Jérome Geronimi |
| Based on | The Wages of Fear byGeorges Arnaud |
| Produced by | Raymond Borderie |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Armand Thirard |
| Edited by | Madeleine Gug Etiennette Muse Henri Rust |
| Music by | Georges Auric |
Production company |
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| Distributed by | Cinédis (France) |
Release date |
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Running time | 153 minutes |
| Countries | France Italy[1] |
| Languages |
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| Box office | 6,944,306 admissions[2] |
The Wages of Fear (French:Le Salaire de la peur[a]) is a 1953thriller film directed and co-written byHenri-Georges Clouzot, and starringYves Montand,Charles Vanel,Peter van Eyck andVéra Clouzot. The film centres on a group of four down-on-their-luck European men who are hired by an American oil company to drive two trucks, loaded withnitroglycerin needed to extinguish anoil well fire, over mountain dirt roads. It is adapted from a 1950 French novel of the same name byGeorges Arnaud.
The film brought Clouzot international fame—winning both theGolden Bear and thePalme d'Or at the1953 Berlin Film Festival andCannes Film Festival, respectively—and enabled him to directLes Diaboliques (1955). In France, it was the fourth highest-grossing film of the year with a total of nearly 7 million admissions.[2]
Frenchmen Mario and Jo,Dutchman Bimba andItalian Luigi are stuck in the isolated town of Las Piedras. Surrounded by desert, the town is linked to the outside world only by an airstrip, but the airfare is beyond the means of the men. There is little opportunity for employment aside from the American corporation that dominates the town, Southern Oil Company (SOC), which operates the nearby oil fields and owns a walled compound within the town. SOC exploits local workers and takes the law into its own hands, but the townspeople depend on it and suffer in silence.
Mario is a sarcastic Corsican playboy who treats his devoted lover, Linda, with disdain. Jo is an aging ex-gangster who recently found himself stranded in the town. Bimba is an intense, quiet man whose father was murdered by theNazis and who had to work as a forced laborer for three years in asalt mine. Luigi, Mario's roommate, is a jovial, hardworking man, who has just learned that he is dying from cement dust in his lungs. Mario befriends Jo due to their common background, having lived inParis, but a rift develops between Jo and the othercantina regulars due to his combative, arrogant personality.
A large fire erupts at one of the SOC oil fields. The only way toextinguish the flames and cap the well is an explosion produced bynitroglycerin. With short notice and lack of proper equipment, it must be transported withinjerrycans placed in two large trucks from the SOC headquarters, 500 km (300 miles) away. Due to the poor condition of the roads and the highly volatile nature of nitroglycerin, the job is considered too dangerous for theunionized SOC employees.
The company foreman, Bill O'Brien, recruits truck drivers from the local community. Despite the dangers, many of the locals volunteer, lured by the high pay: US$2,000 per driver. This is a fortune to them, perhaps the only way out of their dead-end lives. The pool of applicants is narrowed down to four drivers: Mario, Bimba and Luigi are chosen, along with a German named Smerloff. Smerloff fails to appear on the appointed day, so Jo, who knows O'Brien from his bootlegging days, takes his place. The other drivers suspect that Jo intimidated Smerloff in some way to facilitate his own hiring.
Jo and Mario transport the nitroglycerin in one vehicle; Luigi and Bimba are in the other, with thirty minutes separating them in order to limit potential casualties. The drivers are forced to deal with a series of physical and mental obstacles, including a stretch of extremely rough road called "the washboard", a construction barricade that forces them to teeter around a rotten platform above a precipice, and a boulder blocking the road. Jo finds that his nerves are not what they used to be, and the others confront Jo about his increasing cowardice. Finally, Luigi and Bimba's truck explodes without warning, killing them both.
Mario and Jo arrive at the scene of the explosion only to find a large crater rapidly filling with oil from a pipeline ruptured in the blast. Jo exits the vehicle to help Mario navigate through the oil-filled crater. The truck, however, is in danger of becoming bogged down and, during their frantic attempts to prevent it from getting stuck, Mario runs over Jo. Although the vehicle is ultimately freed from the muck, Jo is mortally injured. On their arrival at the oil field, Mario and Jo are hailed as heroes, but Jo is dead and Mario collapses from exhaustion. Upon his recovery, he heads home in the same truck. He collects double the wages following his friends' deaths and refuses the chauffeur offered by SOC. Mario jubilantly drives down a mountain road as a party is being held at the cantina back in town, where Mario's friends eagerly await his arrival. He swerves recklessly and intentionally, having cheated death so many times on the same road. Linda, dancing in the cantina, faints. Mario takes a corner too fast and plunges through the guardrail to his death.
The Wages of Fear was critically hailed upon its original release.Bosley Crowther ofThe New York Times wrote, "The excitement derives entirely from the awareness of nitroglycerine and the gingerly, breathless handling of it. You sit there waiting for the theatre to explode[3]". The film was also a commercial success, selling 6,944,306 tickets in France where it was the fourth highest earning film of the year.[4][5]
In 1982,Pauline Kael called it "an existential thriller—the most original and shocking French melodrama of the 50s. ... When you can be blown up at any moment only a fool believes that character determines fate. ... If this isn't a parable of man's position in the modern world, it's at least an illustration of it. ... The violence is not used simply for excitement--it's used as in Eisenstein's and Buñuel's films: to force a vision of human experience."[6] In 1992,Roger Ebert stated that "The film's extended suspense sequences deserve a place among the great stretches of cinema."[7]Leonard Maltin awarded the film3+1⁄2 out of 4 stars, calling it a "marvelously gritty and extremely suspenseful epic".[8]In 2019, the film was ranked No. 9 inEmpire's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema."[9] The websiteRotten Tomatoes reported that100% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 53 reviews, with aweighted average of 8.90/10. Its critics consensus reads: "An existential suspense classic,The Wages of Fear blends nonstop suspense with biting satire; its influence is still being felt on today's thrillers."[10]Metacritic reports a score of 85 out of 100 based on 15 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[11]
The British-American filmmakerChristopher Nolan was strongly influenced byThe Wages of Fear for his filmDunkirk.[12]
One of the best known and most successful of Clouzot's films,The Wages of Fear has been widely released on every home video format.[13][14][15] However, with the exception of a French DVD (TF1 Vidéo, 2001) featuring the original 153-minute French theatrical version, until recently most releases contained a slightly edited 148-minute version. A comprehensive 4K restoration, based on the original negative, was completed by TF1 Studio in 2017. The 4K colour correction was carried out byJérôme Bigueur under the supervision ofGuillaume Schiffman.[16][17] It has greatly improved audio and video quality.[18][19] The film has been released on Blu-ray, DVD andDCP in France (TF1 Vidéo), the UK (BFI), and Japan (IVC).
The film was colourised in 1996 with the approval of Clouzot's daughter.[20] It was subsequently broadcast on French television+ and released on French VHS.[21]
Violent Road (akaHell's Highway), directed byHoward W. Koch in 1958, andSorcerer, directed byWilliam Friedkin in 1977, are Americanremakes, although the former is not credited as such. Friedkin described the latter as an adaptation of the original novel.[25]
The plot was adapted for an episode of the 1980s American TV seriesMacGyver,"Hellfire" (S01E08).[26][27]
A third remake was released in late March 2024 byNetflix. Directed byJulien Leclercq, the new film starsFranck Gastambide,Alban Lenoir,Ana Girardot andSofiane Zermani.[28]
When asked about the Henri-Georges Clouzot masterpiece, Nolan said the following: "Yes, The Wages of Fear. Most of the crew didn't understand why I was screening them this movie. But it was the one that made the most sense. Pure suspense. Which talks about mechanics, procedure and physical difficulties. Look at the scene where the truck has to go back on the platform and the wheels doesn't respond anymore ... That's what I had to look for Dunkirk! I wanted to show how you bring a truck on the jetty, what happens when the tires don't pass, when the wheels no longer respond. Pure physics."
