Awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival amid much mouth-frothing from the American press over its alleged communist credentials, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic The Wages of Fear now seems much less like a potboiler spin on Salt of the Earth and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since. Time has inevitably eradicated the contemporary circumstance that fed its political reception and modern audiences will surely recognize that the howls of anti-Americanism said more about the accuser than the accused. If anything, The Wages of Fear now registers as the callous post-World War II flipside to Casablanca, in which people have been scattered not only into pockets of nobility, but also outposts of pusillanimity.
If Diabolique was Clouzot’s bid to out-Hitchcock Hitchcock, then The Wages of Fear is a little bit like a Howard Hawks thriller, only without the mitigating presence of women. The film opens in Las Piedras, a parched, godless shantytown on the outskirts of a South American oil jackpot. There, Clouzot and co-screenwriter Jérōme Géronimi (the nom de plume of his brother Jean) introduce, and in no rush, a rogue’s gallery of international losers that even the Nazis in Argentina wouldn’t have. They spit, steal each other’s clothes, pet women like dogs, and all pine for the chance to scrape together enough bread to make their journey back home, where hopefully everyone has forgotten whatever they did to necessitate their dislocation.
For Frenchmen Mario (a half-surly, half-homoeroticized Yves Montand) and Jo (Charles Vanel), ex-Nazi Dutchman Bimba (Peter Van Eyck), and poor Italian Luigi (Folco Lulli) with his cement-caked lungs, that chance comes when one of the squatting oil conglomerate’s rigs ignites, killing some of the people of Las Piedras. The unwelcome interlopers take the oil company’s fat paycheck to drive a pair of big rigs across a treacherous couple hundred miles to the fire. Their job becomes a grueling journey across a minefield, only the mines are strapped to the insulated flatbeds of their trucks: They’re to deliver massive payloads of nitroglycerin to the site so crews can detonate and extinguish the burning pyre.
Unlike Diabolique, which needed at least some semblance of an empathetic core to justify its protracted “gotcha!” climax, Clouzot’s nihilism distends The Wages of Fear. Literally and figuratively, the four men are lost souls propelled forward not by their belief in the mission, but rather because there’s no other choice but death, either in Las Piedras or holding the steering wheel of a mobile bomb. When their nerves begin to fray and their patience is repeatedly tested, Clouzot presents them without pity, and Jo in particular becomes a whimpering, flatulent jellyfish. Perversely, though, it’s Clouzot’s seeming lack of empathy that allows the four of them to emerge as humans. Sure, they’re cowardly, desperate, and merciless in their pursuit of that $2,000 ticket home, but by God and the Southern Oil Company, they’re alive. Just.
Image/Sound
I thought The 400 Blows looked good for a black-and-white transfer, but The Wages of Fear almost blows it out of the crude moat. The restored print contains very little film damage, and even if black levels fade in and out, other scenes, like the sun-baked battle against a rickety wooden bridge to nowhere, are rendered utterly stark. I detected no major artifacts. The monaural sound doesn’t exactly pack a punch even when stuff starts blowing up, but it’s nice to know that Criterion is willing to assign uncompressed soundtracks to all their releases, regardless of their age or sonic limitations.
Extras
The extra features are the same as could be found on the earlier DVD reissue. They include video interviews with assistant director Michel Romanoff and Henri-Georges Clouzot biographer Marc Godin, as well as five minutes’ worth from a 1988 interview with Yves Montand, no longer looking quite the hanky-necked Jean Genet fantasy he did in 1953. Also included is an hour-long documentary on Clouzot’s career (focusing particular attention on his wife and leading lady Vera, who took on the only notable female role in Wages) and a scene-by-scene examination of the 50 minutes cut from the film for its original U.S. release. As much as I’d like to confirm that most cuts were made by anti-Red gargoyles, it seems apparent that at least a few of the earlier scenes were likely snipped in order to sell a two-and-a-half-hour behemoth as a sleek, 90-minute action flick.
Overall
A white-knuckled introduction to the concept of action-movie existentialism, The Wages of Fear makes for a pummeling black-and-white Blu-ray.
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