The Wages of Fear

* * * *

DVD Review - Classic Adventure - Foreign

We all know that the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23), but what about The Wages of Fear? This 143 minute masterpiece, co-written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, expresses the results of fear in a variety of hues that render this black-and-white classic, dazzling.

First released in 1953, The Wages of Fear opened two years later and 20 percent shorter in New York. The winner of the Palme d’or at Cannes, Clouzot’s film has been hailed as a singular film achievement rivaling the Master of Suspense; Hitchcock.

This existential adventure opens in the grungy village of Las Piedras, a Latin American community controlled by the only major employer; American owned Southern Oil. This dilapidated backwater is the habitat of a colorful crowd of unemployed European drifters and indigenous peoples who hang around swatting flies, playing cards and drinking their time away. Even in their lighthearted conversations and lifestyle there is an overwhelming sense of abandonment to a hopeless situation and unspoken fears.

Faced with a disastrous oil well-fire, Southern Oil decides to hire four non-union drivers from the community. The mission: drive two beat-up trucks three hundred miles over a rarely utilized road, into the mountains, through impenetrable jungle, across scorching desert, transporting barrels of hair-trigger nitroglycerin to extinguish the fire. There is no shortage of volunteers for this perilous mission, and while the first hour of the tale establishes the antiheroes and their desperate lives, the remainder of the story is reminiscent of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The hand-picked drivers include a swaggering young Frenchman (Yves Montand), an old Parisian con artist (Charles Vanel), an Italian with lung disease (Folco Lulli) and a steely German pilot (Peter van Eyck).

It’s hard to imagine, in this day of the monster fast-action film, that seventy minutes of two trucks driving five miles an hour could be entertaining, but Clouzot lays masterful track to accomplish just this. The first hour of the film is spent in the village setting, where I became nearly as despondent as the occupants and began to wonder how I was going to escape the dreadful dead end environment. Then the opportunity arrived, and along with the chosen four I departed, feeling that at five miles an hour I was being jettisoned away from Las Piedras at the speed of light.

At the time of its release, the controversial elements of capitalism, global economy, and exploitation of Third World countries by the First World countries were glossed over or not spoken of at all. That and the hint of homosexuality were enough to have this film clipped by the censors. But, The Wages of Fear was re-released in New York in 1992 and can be seen in its full-length version today. The film is mostly sub-titled, except where the Americans are speaking, and there are moments of archaic melodrama, but this is a classic masterpiece for a reason.