The Wages of Fear (1953)
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Writers: Georges Arnaud; Henri-Georges Clouzot
Stars: Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck
Runtime: 131 minutes
Plot: In a decrepit South American village, men are hired to transport an urgent nitro-glycerine shipment without the equipment that would make it safe.
Review: In an adaptation of Georges Arnaud's "A Salary of Fear", Clouzot films the process in a model of grinding, unrelieved suspense. The film was shot in black and white, not in South America but in the South of France. And it is now well over 50 years old.
Yet the inspired calculation of action and agonised human reaction is irresistible and inescapable. It is a film that leaves the audience shattered and exhausted, all of which is enhanced by the feeling, common to most of Clouzot's pictures, that he rather despised people and knew that sooner or later their worst traits would come through. Of course, the trick to that is that tough guys become all the more heroic because they are not sentimentalised. Yves Montand does appear hard-grained and ruthless as the one Frenchman who survives, and Folco Lulli is vulgar and nerveless as the Italian who gets killed. We are there with them, and, as in any intense experience of combat or action, they become brothers and comrades. It would not be fair to mention how this picture ends, other than to say that the conclusion is a deliberate and arbitrary irony.
Reviewed by Mohaiminul Islam
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