THE WAGES OF FEAR
Roger Ebert
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When the great French thriller "The Wages of Fear" (1953) was first
released in America, it was missing parts of several early scenes -
because it was too long, the U.S. distributors said, and because they
were anti-American, according to the Parisian critics. Now that the
movie is available for the first time in the original cut of director
Henri-Georges Clouzot, it is possible to see that both sides have a
point.
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The film's extended suspense sequences deserve a place among the
great stretches of cinema. Four desperate men, broke and stranded in a
backwater of Latin America, sign up on a suicidal mission to drive two
truckloads of nitroglycerin 300 miles down a hazardous road. They could
be blown to pieces at any instant, and in the film's most famous scene
Clouzot requires them to turn their trucks around on a rickety,
half-finished timber platform high above a mountain gorge.
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Their journey also requires them to use some of the nitroglycerin to
blow up a massive boulder in the road, and at the end, after a pipeline
ruptures, a truck has to pass through a pool of oil that seems to tar
them with the ignominy of their task. For these are not heroes, Clouzot
seems to argue, but men who have valued themselves at the $2,000 a head
that the oil company will pay them if they get the nitro to the wellhead
where it is needed.
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The company, which significantly has the same initials as Standard
Oil, is an American firm that exploits workers in the unnamed nation
where the film is set. The screenplay is specific about the motives of
the American boss who hires the truck drivers: "They don't belong to a
union, and they don't have any relatives, so if anything happens, no one
will come around causing trouble." There are other moments when the
Yankee capitalists are made out as the villains, and reportedly these
were among the scenes that were trimmed before the film opened in this
country.
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The irony is that the trims have been restored at a time when they
have lost much of their relevance, revealing that the movie works better
as a thriller than as a political tract, anyway. The opening sequence,
set in the dismal village where unemployed men fight for jobs, is
similar to the opening of John Huston's "Treasure of the Sierra Madre"
(1948), even down to the detail of visiting the local barber. But while
Huston used his opening to establish his characters and work in some wry
humor, Clouzot creates mostly aimless ennui.
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Although eager to establish his anti-American subtext, he reveals
himself as a reactionary in sexual politics with the inexplicable
character of Linda (Vera Clouzot), who does menial jobs in the saloon.
She is in love with one of the local layabouts (Yves Montand, in his
first dramatic role), who slaps her around and tells her to get lost,
and she spends most of her time sprawled on the ground, although always
impeccably made up. There is no apparent purpose for this character,
apart from the way she functions to set up such lines as, "Women are no
good."
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If the opening sequences, now restored, have a tendency to drag, the
movie is heart-stopping once the two trucks begin their torturous
300-mile journey to a blazing oil well. The cinematographer, Armand
Thirard, pins each team of men into its claustrophobic truck cab, where
every jolt and bump in the road causes them to wince, waiting for a
death that, if it comes, will happen so suddenly they will never know
it.
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Clouzot does an especially effective job of setting up the best
sequence, where first one and then the other truck has to back up on the
unstable wooden platform in order to get around a hairpin bend in the
trail. The first truck is used to establish the situation, so we know
exactly what Montand is up against when he arrives at the scene: Rotten
timbers break, the truck begins to slide sideways, a steel support cable
gets caught on the side of the truck, and we are watching great
technical work as it creates great fiction.
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When William Friedkin remade "The Wages of Fear" as "Sorcerer" in
1977, he combined this scene with a later one, in a jungle setting, to
create a sequence where a truck wavers on a vast, unstable suspension
bridge. Friedkin had greater technical resources, and his sequence looks
more impressive, but Clouzot's editing selects each moment so correctly
that you can see where Friedkin, and a lot of other directors, got their
inspiration.
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One thing that establishes "The Wages of Fear" as a film from the
early 1950s, and not from today, is its attitude toward happy endings.
Modern Hollywood thrillers cannot end in tragedy for its heroes, because
the studios won't allow it. "The Wages of Fear" is completely free to
let anything happen to any of its characters, and if all four are not
dead when the nitro reaches the blazing oil well, it may be because
Clouzot is even more deeply ironic than we expect. The last scene, where
a homebound truck is intercut with a celebration while a Strauss waltz
plays on the radio, is a reminder of how much Hollywood has traded away
by insisting on the childishness of the obligatory happy ending.
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NOTE: This new, restored print of "The Wages of Fear" is now at the
Music Box, and is also available on videotape and on a laserdisc in the
Criterion Collection. See it on the big screen if you possibly can.
From Chicago
Sun-Times
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