Four desperate men. Two trucks full of nitroglycerine that can blow up an entire city. And a suicide mission in South America on dodgy roads. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 masterwork, The Wages of Fear , makes for one of the most nerve-wracking experiences ever rendered on screen.
Many films are considered historically significant but often remain so in the realm of cinema studies and of infinite dissection. But love and admiration is reserved only for those that can stay relevant as well as entertaining over a period of time. In Hollywood, Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) are considered the benchmarks of high-concept thrillers that metamorphosed into summer blockbusters. But the seed of their success can be traced back to the four grim faces who had their destiny tied to the ominous nitro.
Clouzot was called the French Hitchcock, but the latter surpassed the former with more fecundity in his filmography. However, when good, Clouzot was simply incomparable. His outing in the thriller genre led to a classic not only of hellish brilliance but also a work that’s as awe-inspiring today as it was at the time of its birth.
But calling it just a thriller would be reducing it to its bare minimum. If you navigate through the dirty town and the rugged terrain, waiting for the screen to detonate, you will notice the film’s socio-political spine and nihilistic heart.
With the opening scene, where a semi-naked boy plays with cockroaches tied to a string (this would later inspire Sam Peckinpah’s opening in The Wild Bunch ), we are told not to have any romantic notions of this world. The town of Las Piedras is unforgiving with poverty all around. The men are all trapped here, desperate to escape but without the money that can provide them the flight.
This one-line plot is enough to drive the film, to kick-start the action, but Clouzot is not interested in serving just a thriller. After setting up the frantic town, he blatantly shows his anti-capitalist stance, by making Southern Oil Company (SOC) an incarnation of American greed. The reason why the film suffered many cuts at its American release.
The four men — Mario, Jo, Luigi and Bimba — are distinct in their desperation. Unlike Hollywood’s penchant for seeking sympathy for men on dangerous missions, here all the men are presented with sweaty unsentimentality. Yves Montand, who could make hearts flutter with his voice, makes Mario explicitly unpleasant because he treats his girlfriend like a lapdog. Charles Vanel’s Jo is a bully who puts off everyone around him, but would appear as the frailest of the quartet, a reason for which the great French star Jean Gabin turned the role down. Peter Van Eyck’s Bimba is Hitler’s wet dream, but clearly personifies Clouzot’s pessimism. Folco Lulli as Luigi is the only one who seems more human than the rest, but it is also a clear indicator that he would be sacrificed at the altar of narrative progression. Clouzot uses his wife Vera to play Linda, the only woman character in the film, to hint at the latent homosexuality of a man she is chasing.
We never know the backstory of the men, how they ended up in this muddy town, which William Friedkin later explored in his gutsy 1977 remake, Sorcerer . Clouzot is more interested in the immediacy of the events. From the time when the men take on the mission so that an oil fire can be snuffed out, he never lets the tension dip for a minute. If the journey begins with keeping a certain speed over a furrowed road (or things will explode) the next challenge is about a wobbly wooden platform to drive by. A boulder blocking the road becomes the third obstacle, and the final one is a pool of oil to drive through.
The sky is almost cloudless, there is no background music to elevate the tension, and the journey never stops being gut-wrenching. It’s like the turn of the screw tightening, slowly and steadily. The film ups the ante of challenging our empathy for these men. When their task ends, the director bares his sadistic fangs by telling us that a happy ending is not really what he has been aiming for. It is a reflection of the post-war existentialist upheaval, and, more importantly, Clouzot’s life’s crises. From the beginning of his career, he suffered from poor health, lack of money, and, above all, a ban on his work. His film Le Corbeau (1943) released when Germany occupied France, managed to offend not only the Nazis but also the French because it was too close to the truth. His bleak worldview is the afterglow of the vilest facets of human nature he witnessed before and after the Second World War.
In Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel, The Salary of Fear , he found the apt subject to make us look through a glass darkly and reveal the masked moral bankruptcy of human society. You see, he was friends with none other than the existentialist master Jean-Paul Sartre.
The writer is a freelance journalist and a screenwriter.
