Henri-Georges Clouzot's nitroglycerin-truck thriller. Four men drive 500 km of mountain road with explosives. The most-tense film of the 1950s.
An unnamed Central American oil town, mid-20th century. The town's economy is dominated by the Southern Oil Company, an American outfit that pays starvation wages to a transient population of European labourers who cannot afford to leave. An oil-well fire 500 kilometres into the mountains requires nitroglycerin to extinguish. The road to the well is unpaved, treacherous, and includes a serpentine descent and a wooden bridge crossing.
The company hires four men — Mario (Yves Montand), Jo (Charles Vanel), Luigi (Folco Lulli), and Bimba (Peter van Eyck) — to drive two trucks carrying nitroglycerin to the well at a flat-rate payment. The drivers know that any sudden bump or shock will detonate the cargo and kill them instantly. The film's second half is the drive itself. Three of the four men die. The film closes on Mario's celebratory drive back, having received the company payment, in a sequence that ends with him crashing on the descent — killed by his own carelessness moments after his survival was secured.
The Wages of Fear's second half — the drive itself — runs roughly ninety minutes. The drive includes: a stretch of corrugated road that the drivers must traverse at speed (slowness would jolt the cargo); the famous 'corner-on-the-cliff' sequence in which the trucks must reverse onto a wooden platform extended out over a 500-metre drop; the crossing of a flooded river that has destroyed the bridge; the navigation around a giant boulder that one truck must blow up to pass.
Each sequence is constructed as a self-contained suspense piece, with the constant background pressure of the explosive cargo. The film's specific gift is the patience with which it constructs each sequence. The corner-on-the-cliff alone runs approximately fifteen minutes. The audience is forced to share the drivers' experience of the time required to safely complete each manoeuvre. The result is one of the most-sustained suspense sequences in cinema history.
The Wages of Fear is, by structural design, a political film about colonial extraction. The American oil company is shown openly exploiting the European labour population the war has displaced; the wages are described as starvation wages; the men accept the suicidal contract because it is the only way they can afford to escape the town. The film's central economic transaction — a man's life for $2,000 in cash that may buy him passage home — is presented as the structural reality of the colonial-extractive economy of the period.
The film was, on initial release, censored in the United States. The political content was edited (several scenes referencing American corporate behaviour were cut for the U.S. release); the restored version was not widely available in America until decades later. The film's continued reputation in working political-cinema circles is partly the function of its early American suppression.
William Friedkin's 1977 remake Sorcerer (with Roy Scheider in the equivalent of the Yves Montand role) is the most-discussed re-engagement with the Wages of Fear premise. Friedkin's version is significantly more visually ambitious — the famous bridge-crossing sequence in Sorcerer is one of the great practical-effects sequences of 1970s American cinema — but the original Clouzot is generally considered the structurally tighter of the two.
The comparison illuminates what each film is doing differently. Clouzot's version is interested in the colonial-extraction context as much as in the drive itself; the first 75 minutes of the film establishes the economic and social conditions that make the drivers' decisions plausible. Friedkin's Sorcerer condenses the setup substantially and centres more on the journey. Both films are excellent; both are arguments for the durability of the underlying premise.