THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953)

The Wages of Fear Poster

**REVERSE SPOILER ALERT: Reading this piece before watching the movie will only leave you confused and clueless.

If it ended with Mario returning home safe to the village and bar and girl, everyone he abused, ‘The Wages of Fear’ would be the most cynical movie I have ever seen. But Clouzot, whose unrelenting mercilessness finally gives way to a little humanity, lets us have our moment of breath and finally kills the protagonist.

It was a death long overdue, and yet in the final moments of revelry, song and dance, we have our fingers crossed, teeth clenched and feet ground to the floor as we scream for Mario to slow down. Never has a film ever drained so neatly, every drop of suspense it could from the audiences. Clouzot’s pleasures are purely sadistic in nature, but that isn’t to say we don’t enjoy it.

This is the happiest ending this movie could get. Had Mario reached home with the wages of his partner and friend, who he used, abused and finally murdered, the movie would be a fascist fantasy.

For the uninitiated, The Wages of Fear is well known for it’s plot. That however, does not prepare one for the sheer length of the first act. The painstaking time and effort it took to establish the desperation of the workers who would accept such a gig. Perhaps a contemporary remake of this movie is in order, that just solves the ‘first act’ problem by having the American oil company hire a few colored people for half of what they paid Mario and his friends. The whole thing would be settled in ten minutes, and since they wouldn’t be white, the film could focus entirely on the situations and explosions.

There is, however, another interpretation for the lengthy first act. Jonathan Rosenbaum has called it a mirror to the then intellectual scene in Paris, in all its dreadful existentialism and brooding nihilism. That workers would line up to die for a potential gig full of thrills of life-and-death is then seen as an extension to the desperate need to escape this brooding nihilism.

A group of foreigners, mostly Europeans slack away their days in an unnamed, godforsaken Central American country that is completely barren, with its only central institution being an American Oil Company base, which is also it’s sole source of employment. We learn that this place is connected to the outside world only by one airstrip, and that it is very cheap to get in, and very expensive to get out. So when a fire breaks out at one of the sites, the oil company decides to put it out by a nitroglycerine explosion. But the nitroglycerine has to be carried there, by road. A definite suicide mission. The company wants two trucks to double the odds, and drivers for the mission who have no family to demand insurance. An advertisement is put out for the job of four drivers, each to be paid 2,000 dollars, money which for many would be a ticket out of hell. Once our drivers take off on their expedition, the film is an unrelenting, non-stop, heart-attack after heart-attack, a classic of suspense that outdoes Hitchcock in massive proportions.

This film exploded the path and made way for several films following closely, a few decades behind. The off-screen, sudden deaths of two-central characters that hits us like the coldest chill we’ve never experienced, the death of all central characters in the end, and some subtle and not-so-subtle homosexual tones. Similarly, it also suffers from being a product of its times: the classic 50s French attitudes are evident: racism, misogyny and the usual snobbishness. I have seen cautionary tales, but none this offensive. This movie demands its audiences get on their knees and beg its characters for kindness, despite knowing that they won’t get it.

If Clouzot comments upon the snobbery of Americans and the spiteful inhumanity of capitalism, he also has something to say about the Europeans, in the way they treat women, and each other. If anything, the Americans are not hypocrites and oppress the natives and Europeans alike. In a way the picture is emblematic of the things to follow: capital’s victory over other tools of division and hatred. Money becomes the big uniting factor, and once it is won over, we will return to our ‘petty squabbles’, spraying soda water on our face to neutralise the afternoon heat, catcalling passing women and getting into brawls with strangers.

The movie was remade by William Friedkin in 1977 as Sorcerer, which is as fine an adaptation as can get, with Friedkin using his absolute witchcraft mastery as a film technician to deliver all the suspense of Clouzot and much more. The two movies make for an informative double-bill, and a lesson in adaptation, certainly one that the makers of the third remake, THE WAGES OF FEAR (2024) did not learn. This one, made for Netflix, is a terrible, uninspired, uninspiring, waste of time that can and should be avoided.

--Written as AmoralKritik for AmoralHighorse