User Reviews

I've often heard of Clouzot referred to as the 'French Hitchcock' although this film seems to share more of a cousin hood with the work of John Houston.

Wages of Fear is about how a bunch of immigrants in Latin America, for money, take on the reckless task of transporting a large consignment of explosive nitroglycerin across 300-miles of obstacle-riddled paths, every moment aware that a single concussion could ignite the entire shipment, blowing them all to bits.

The film begins with the setting of the locale and introduction of its principal characters - the regular irregulars Mario and Luigi (just realized the striking similarity to Nintendo's famous plumber duo, hmm), the mafioso type new entrant Jo who strikes up a friendship with the raffish Mario becoming his mentor but antagonizes the rest of the townsfolk with his bossy attitude, Mario's mistress Linda who naively worships him but is in turn kept as a pleasure item. The town is a dead-end rife with poverty and unemployment, its only industry being the Southern Oil Corporation (SOC) a Yankee enterprise. The residents are too demoralized to even consider escape to better climes. Like Mario explains to Jo in the course of a brilliantly spliced sequence of jump-cuts that covers the entire aspect of the town, "It's like prison. Easy to get in, but escape is impossible."

A major fire at the oil-wells calls for immediate shipment of explosive to isolate the blaze, but it's too late to bring in the specialized transportation. The company offers a payment of $2000 each for 4 locals who will carry the hazardous shipment in ordinary trucks. Mario, Jo, Luigi and a Jew Bimba take on the job, the promise of money to help them escape from the town sufficient even to temporarily offset the fear of death. Thus begins the arduous, tension-ridden journey that occupies most of this 148-min film. The trucks must move above a certain minimum speed to minimize vibrations (a ruse reused in 1994's Speed). On the way they face various blocks including a rickety wooden bridge the trucks must back up over. Mid-journey one of the trucks blows up. Mario and Jo who are in the other truck must overcome their horror at the catastrophe and cross further hurdles including a lake of oil created by the bursting of a pipeline.

In the course of the journey we see a reversal in the roles of Jo and Mario. Initially Mario looks up to Jo, in awe of his cool and worldly-wise manner. But Jo is soon revealed to be in reality a scared old man for whom Mario has only a contemptuous pity. This character drama makes for engrossing viewing and in no small measure due to the excellent performances, especially Charles Vanel as Jo.

The story moves smoothly thanks to very precise cutting, and some of the nighttime photography, as also the scene at the oil lake, is worth mentioning. Clouzot obviously has a sure hand over the bulk of the proceedings although he slips up in a couple of places: The oil company is portrayed in a rather ham-fisted (and badly acted) way as this evil uncaring monolith that would gladly blame dead employees for disasters to avoid compensation and resort to thoroughly unethical means to get its job done. Most of the supporting characters are cardboard. Also, some of the miniature work is painfully obvious, although that'd be likely a limitation of technical facilities available to the crew. The ending of the film is finely executed but seems all too contrived to give you your daily dose of irony.

In the end, this remains a taut and finger-licking good old-school thriller, which bothers to provide characters interesting enough for us to care about their life and death.

As a kid watching TV shows and movies in The Fifties, I can't tell you how many I ran across that had nitroglycerine as part of the plot. There were at least a couple of Westerns along with straight dramas, but it didn't seem to matter the genre. A souped up hot rod carrying four quarts of nitro that just happened to be hanging around was used by the main character to destroy "The Giant Gila Monster" in a campy 1959 monster flick.

Whatever the fascination with nitroglycerine, and it had to be it's unpredictability, the idea of carrying around a ton of it was the premise of this film, "The Wages of Fear". Actually, it was two trucks carrying a ton of nitro between them, I guess to heighten the drama and provide twice as much in the way of nerve shattering tension. The thing is, unlike a host of reviewers who hold the picture in the highest regard, I really didn't get a whole lot out of the movie.

For starters, the first forty five minutes or so was used to introduce characters and situations that eventually had nothing to do with the outcome of the story. Yves Montand portrayed his character Mario well enough, but the guy was just a reprobate for the most part. He consistently berated the lovely saloon gal Linda (Vera Clouzot), and actually threw her in the dirt when he drove off on the mission to deliver the goods. Same thing with his partner Jo (Charles Vanel), who started the picture as one of film's ruggedest macho men, and turned into a cream puff when the going got tough. I just didn't understand how characters would just suddenly switch their basic personas as the story progressed.

Then there's the adventure on the road. Maybe I missed it, but what was the rationale for that wooden bridge turnabout that both drivers had trouble with? Was it that the size of the trucks wouldn't allow for a smooth ninety degree turn? Even so, after the first mishap with the truck driven by Bimba (Peter van Eyck), why would Mario feel compelled to back his truck right to the very edge of the unstable platform? It didn't make sense to me.

And then, showing his contempt for Jo, Mario runs him over in that manic oil pit scene. I have to admit, that was the stunner for this viewer. That scene had both actors earning their paycheck, and it rivals the clay pit scene in "The Defiant Ones" with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis for sheer insanity, in another Fifties action flick. Both are just hellacious, you be the judge.

Except for that scene, most of the rest of the story didn't hold the same amount of interest for me. When the truck with Bimba and Luigi (Folco Lulli) blew up, I thought that it would have been better served if there was a close-up of the two men in the truck hitting a rut and offering a grimace just before fading to black and then showing the explosion. That would have better sealed their fate; I had to wonder why no one thought of it.

With all that, I don't mean to imply this was a terrible picture. It's watchable enough, but just doesn't seem to measure up to the accolades it's given as an IMDb Top 250 film. But that's the case for a lot of others as well, so in this case, maybe it's just me. On another day I might have seen it in an entirely different light.

In Clouzot, relationships are arenas of conflict: violent, callous, and often destined to sink into a whirlpool of deceit and destructive cruelty…

Clouzot forms with "The Wages of Fear" two teams of four desperate European expatriates who agree to drive two trucks of nitroglycerine across miles of rocky mountain matched with craters to a site of an oil refinery fire so that the oil company can then blow the pipeline and put out the blaze...

The audaciously slow, atmospheric opening establishes both characters and the malignant influence of US oil interests in a dusty South American village, before the odyssey begins… The tension never stumbles: friendship falls prey to financial greed, honor to a sweaty fear of sudden death

I intend to deal explicitly with the ending of this film. Be warned.

Many comments have dealt with the gradual build-up of tension and character which makes this film so riveting. They are all true. But a lot of people cannot understand the ending, and therefore condemn it. The ending is, however, integral to the meaning of the film as a whole. These four men are warned that taking this job, no matter how much it pays, will cost them their lives. We understand that they are in a situation where one mistake will cost them their lives, and only fearlessness can save them. We see that M. Jo, a bully who gets what he wants by pushing people like Luigi around, turns into a snivelling coward when faced with a couple of tons of nitro he can't bully. His fear causes him to lose others' respect, his self-respect, and eventually his life. But our hero has no fear, and so of course he must survive, right? Wrong. Fear protects us, keeps us from endangering ourselves. Without fear, our hero cannot keep himself out of danger. Therefore he dies. Stupidly. And it's his own fault.

Think about what was going on in 1953; millions of people had eight years earlier come out of a situation as nail-biting as driving a truck full of nitro. They talk about the "lost generation" being the survivors of the First World War, but the same happened in the Second. The ending makes sense of the title; not only the wages of sin but the wages of fear (of having to face extreme fear, that is)is death. It is brilliant how a film which is so entertaining on a superficial level is also so deep.

Clouzot was a very strange director. Even he admitted that he used suspense as a device to examine his characters. Only Diabolique seems to have any real suspense. The nitro in this film is used the same as the letters in The Raven and the murder in Quai Des Ouvres: he is up to his old tricks of immersing you in the rot and smell of existence: buzzards, spitting, smoke coming disgustingly out of noses during a kind of Russian Roulette, etc. Only one other film do you feel the sheer heat of a place as much as this: Stray Dog. Nineteen Fifty three was more or less around the apotheosis of Existentialism, And Clouzot hardly needed a bedside copy of Being and Nothingness for his handbook. This film, because of it's length, has the greatest wealth of his bodily references.... Even down to Vera Clouzot's underarm hair: you see a flash of it as she raises her hands in a dance turn with Folco Lulli, and how often do you ever see a woman's underarms not shaved, even in French Films, much less anywhere else. For those who found the film suspenseful, fine. I didn't. Not at its heart, anyway. That would be like saying Polanski's Repulsion was suspenseful. Both are films of immersion, descents into madness and chaos. And now here is a spoiler: if you do not want to know how the movie ends, bye bye. The end is ludicrous. But then so are most in his films. None of them hold up very well, with the possible exception of the the end of Diabolique: its mystical take kind of works. However, the mystical take of Montand's death here is simply stupid. If he has to go off the road and down a cliff, let the truck he is driving simply suffer a sudden blowout, or differential fatigue, some kind of mechanical malfunction...not playing with it on the road like a three year old......and even then, certainly not have Vera Clouzot know telepathically that he has gone over to his death. But there are so many fine touches in this movie, you watch it for them. Too bad it could not have been a much more disciplined effort, but what it there makes most movies today seem tired and trite. Also, for those interested, notice the striking similarity of the opening images of this film, and the first shots of The Wild Bunch. Just too bad he could not have ended the film on such a pure note. But bravo anyway, great treat, wonderful film.

After watching the movie i am shocked that it is considered a classic. Maybe because it was unusual for the time , i cannot judge that, but i was extremely disappointed. Especially with the character build up . The one that stands out the most at being ridiculous to the extreme is Jo. In the beginning he is presented as a tough guy who fears nothing , but this does not work at all . He seems ridiculous from the first second he enters the scene . After a while he turns out to be whiny and full of fear , but because the whole build up of the character was so not believable , i did not care at all about his fate or supposed transformation. Of course you can say he should be presented as ridiculous but if that is the case why bother making him such a big character? What really disturbed me is the way the relationship between yes montand and the girl in the city is presented. It is very sexist and the whole macho culture of the movie was getting on my nerves a lot after a while.