The Wages of Fear (Preview)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Louis Wipf; directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot; screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jérome Gérônimi, based on Georges Arnaud’s novel; cinematography by Armand Thirard; edited by Henri Rust and Madeleine Gug; art direction by René Renoux; music by Georges Auric; starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck, William Tubbs, Véra Clouzot, and Folco Lulli. 4K UHD + Blu-ray, Blu-ray, or DVD, B&W, French dialogue with English subtitles, 152 min., 1953. A Criterion Collection release.

It’s commonplace to say that a thriller or action picture puts you on the edge of your seat, but there’s a subset of such movies where talk of gut-punch impact isn’t entirely metaphorical. For many moviegoers, including me, Exhibit A in this category is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s epic The Wages of Fear, which took top prizes at the Cannes and Berlin festivals in 1953, reached the United States in a bowdlerized version two years later, and won fresh acclaim when the censored material (a whopping fifty minutes) was restored in 1992. I won’t go as far as novelist Dennis Lehane does in his program essay for The Criterion Collection’s new edition—it isn’t quite “a work of art so viscerally nerve-wracking that one fears a misplaced whisper from the audience could cause the screen to explode,” although the hyperbole is understandable. But few other pictures get my mirror neurons firing the way this one can. And alongside its bristling suspense there’s a deep well of psychological drama, dark-toned philosophy, and progressive politics. It’s no exaggeration to call this a movie for the ages.

The narrative comes from a grimly entertaining novel by Georges Arnaud, wrestled into a script by Clouzot and his brother Jean, a frequent writing partner who went by Jérôme Géronimi because the director wanted only one Clouzot in the limelight. The setting is an unhappy corner of an unnamed South American country, where impoverished locals live alongside an assortment of ill-fated foreigners who hate where they’ve landed but can’t risk returning whence they came. Nor do they want to labor for the Southern Oil Company, a profit- hungry American outfit that exploits its workers as callously as it pillages the landscape. A raging fire has broken out at a field about three hundred miles away, and the only way to quench it is to blow up the blaze with nitroglycerin trucked in over roads that are mercilessly rough, erratic, and treacherous. It’s a nearly impossible mission, so the hard-boiled company manager offers hefty payment to anyone brave and/or desperate enough to take the job. The story shifts into high gear when a two-truck convoy hits the road, with indolent Mario (Yves Montand) and shiftless Jo (Charles Vanel) in one vehicle, fatalistic Bimba (Peter Van Eyck) and lung-diseased Luigi (Folco Lulli) in the other, and a relentless string of hazards and death traps before them. A stretch so rugged it’s known as “the washboard” requires speed either so slow that the nitro will arrive too late or so fast that the driving is almost uncontrollable. Later, a construction blockage necessitates a complicated turn on a teetering mountainside platform made of rotting wood; then an enormous boulder bars the way, calling for drastic emergency measures; and a deepening pool of oil from a broken pipeline seems downright impassible. Then comes the finale, and although Clouzot’s films often finish with disquieting twists, the close of this hair-raising journey, slightly modified from Arnaud’s novel, may be the most fiercely ironic of them all.

Filming the trek was no easy task. In an informative Criterion extra, assistant director Michel Romanoff says the budget was limited, the crew numbered fewer than twenty, flooding temporarily stalled the shoot, and Clouzot rehearsed village scenes on the set before it was finished. It’s small wonder that the first year of production produced only thirty-seven to thirty-eight minutes of footage, but Clouzot was a nonstop worker, and he kept the project moving as doggedly as the trucks in the story. Romanoff reports that the actors in the boulder-explosion scene were as worried as the characters about causing a lethal rockslide, and to make the oil pool look real Clouzot insisted on mixing pulverized animal bones and water. The spectacle of a twelve-ton truck crashing down a cliffside, which could be done only once, was filmed by no fewer than five cameras.

It’s surprising that such a powerful film was so drastically shortened before its American premiere, and the chief reason was evidently political. An extra on the Criterion disc summarizes the censorship, noting that a motivating factor was the presence of Yves Montand in his first major film appearance. In the early Fifties, he was both an acclaimed singer and a well-known radical, and a Variety report from Cannes stated that “publicity about his Commie leanings presents a problem for its possible U.S. market,” adding that Clouzot, too, was “reportedly far on the left side.” The point about Montand was fair, the point about Clouzot not so much—indeed, after the war he’d gone on trial for allegedly cooperating with the Nazis during the Vichy period. The majority of French film-industry workers had been forced to do the same, however, and in another Criterion extra, Eddy Vicken’s 2004 documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot: The Enlightened Tyrant, the director’s brother Marcel refutes the “idiotic” collaboration charge, saying his sibling “wasn’t for anything. He didn’t give a damn about Nazism or Communism—his ideology was HenriClouzotism, that’s all.”

And yet, and yet. Clouzot’s personal politics may have been nebulous, but his 1943 whodunit Le Corbeau is a thinly veiled attack on the epidemic of informing that swept through occupied France—“the French were enthusiastic informers in this dark time,” his brother Marcel contends, “to the point of disgusting even the Germans”—and The Wages of Fear is unsparing in its depiction of American capitalism and colonialism, both clearly signified by the Southern Oil Company and the unfeeling O’Brien (William Tubbs), its predatory foreman. In one of the deleted scenes, O’Brien is planning the nitroglycerin run, and another exec tells him the drivers won’t have a fifty-fifty chance of surviving it. “We’ll keep trying till one gets through, that’ll be enough,” O’Brien responds, declaring that the “tramps” he’ll recruit “don’t have any union or any families, and if they blow up, nobody will come around bothering me for any contribution.” Criterion’s censorship video cites an important Cineaste article written by Richard Porton in 1992, detailing shortened or omitted scenes that stress the “nefariousness” of the company and show the political awareness of the native residents, such as a woman who rallies a crowd to demand information about the deadly fire, which the company is trying to cover up. The video also quotes a 1955 Film Culture article suggesting that some of the censorship was a homophobic attempt to dilute the “personal camaraderie” seen in the picture, although this seems a bit of a stretch to me. In any case, all this material is back in the movie with its full intensity intact…

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David Sterritt, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, is author or editor of fifteen books on film.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 4