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The Wages of Fear

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For the Tellison album, see The Wages of Fear (album).

The Wages of Fear
Promotional poster
Directed byHenri-Georges Clouzot
Screenplay byHenri-Georges Clouzot
Jérome Geronimi
Based onLe Salaire de la peur
(1950 novel)
by Georges Arnaud
Produced byRaymond Borderie
Starring
CinematographyArmand Thirard
Edited byMadeleine Gug
Etiennette Muse
Henri Rust
Music byGeorges Auric
Production
company
    • Vera Film
    • Filmsonor
    • C.I.C.C.
    • Fono Roma
Distributed byCinédis (France)
Release date
  • 22 April 1953 (1953-04-22)
Running time
153 minutes
CountriesFrance
Italy[1]
Languages
  • French
  • Spanish
  • English
  • Italian
Box office6,944,306 admissions[2]

The Wages of Fear (French: Le Salaire de la peur[a]) is a 1953 thriller film directed and co-written by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck and Véra Clouzot. The film centres on a group of four down-on-their-luck European men who are hired by an American oil company to drive two trucks, loaded with nitroglycerin needed to extinguish an oil well fire, over mountain dirt roads. It is adapted from a 1950 French novel by Georges Arnaud.

The film brought Clouzot international fame—winning both the Golden Bear and the Palme d'Or at the 1953 Berlin Film Festival and Cannes Film Festival, respectively—and enabled him to direct Les Diaboliques (1955). In France, it was the fourth highest-grossing film of the year with a total of nearly 7 million admissions.[2]

Plot

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Frenchmen Mario and Jo, German Bimba and Italian Luigi are stuck in the isolated town of Las Piedras. Surrounded by desert, the town is linked to the outside world only by an airstrip, but the airfare is beyond the means of the men. There is little opportunity for employment aside from the American corporation that dominates the town, Southern Oil Company (SOC), which operates the nearby oil fields and owns a walled compound within the town. SOC exploits local workers and takes the law into its own hands, but the townspeople depend on it and suffer in silence.

Mario is a sarcastic Corsican playboy who treats his devoted lover, Linda, with disdain. Jo is an aging ex-gangster who recently found himself stranded in the town. Bimba is an intense, quiet man whose father was murdered by the Nazis and who himself worked for three years in a salt mine. Luigi, Mario's roommate, is a jovial, hardworking man, who has just learned that he is dying from cement dust in his lungs. Mario befriends Jo due to their common background, having lived in Paris, but a rift develops between Jo and the other cantina regulars due to his combative, arrogant personality.

A large fire erupts at one of the SOC oil fields. The only way to extinguish the flames and cap the well is an explosion produced by nitroglycerin. With short notice and lack of proper equipment, it must be transported within jerrycans placed in two large trucks from the SOC headquarters, 500 km (300 miles) away. Due to the poor condition of the roads and the highly volatile nature of nitroglycerin, the job is considered too dangerous for the unionised SOC employees.

The company foreman, Bill O'Brien, recruits truck drivers from the local community. Despite the dangers, many of the locals volunteer, lured by the high pay: US$2,000 per driver. This is a fortune to them, perhaps the only way out of their dead-end lives. The pool of applicants is narrowed down to four drivers: Mario, Bimba and Luigi are chosen, along with a German named Smerloff. Smerloff fails to appear on the appointed day, so Jo, who knows O' Brien from his bootlegging days, takes his place. The other drivers suspect that Jo intimidated Smerloff in some way to facilitate his own hiring.

Jo and Mario transport the nitroglycerin in one vehicle; Luigi and Bimba are in the other, with thirty minutes separating them in order to limit potential casualties. The drivers are forced to deal with a series of physical and mental obstacles, including a stretch of extremely rough road called "the washboard", a construction barricade that forces them to teeter around a rotten platform above a precipice, and a boulder blocking the road. Jo finds that his nerves are not what they used to be, and the others confront Jo about his increasing cowardice. Finally, Luigi and Bimba's truck explodes without warning, killing them both.

Mario and Jo arrive at the scene of the explosion only to find a large crater rapidly filling with oil from a pipeline ruptured in the blast. Jo exits the vehicle to help Mario navigate through the oil-filled crater. The truck, however, is in danger of becoming bogged down and, during their frantic attempts to prevent it from getting stuck, Mario runs over Jo. Although the vehicle is ultimately freed from the muck, Jo is mortally injured. On their arrival at the oil field, Mario and Jo are hailed as heroes, but Jo is dead and Mario collapses from exhaustion. Upon his recovery, he heads home in the same truck. He collects double the wages following his friends' deaths and refuses the chauffeur offered by SOC. Mario jubilantly drives down a mountain road as a party is being held at the cantina back in town, where Mario's friends eagerly await his arrival. He swerves recklessly and intentionally, having cheated death so many times on the same road. Linda, dancing in the cantina, faints. Mario takes a corner too fast and plunges through the guardrail to his death.

Cast

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Reception and legacy

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The Wages of Fear was critically hailed upon its original release. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, "The excitement derives entirely from the awareness of nitroglycerine and the gingerly, breathless handling of it. You sit there waiting for the theatre to explode."[3] The film was also a hit with the public, selling 6,944,306 tickets in France where it was the fourth highest earning film of the year.[4][5]

In 1982, Pauline Kael called it "an existential thriller—the most original and shocking French melodrama of the 50s. ... When you can be blown up at any moment only a fool believes that character determines fate. ... If this isn't a parable of man's position in the modern world, it's at least an illustration of it. ... The violence ... is used to force a vision of human existence."[6] In 1992, Roger Ebert stated that "The film's extended suspense sequences deserve a place among the great stretches of cinema."[7] Leonard Maltin awarded the film 3+1⁄2 out of 4 stars, calling it a "marvelously gritty and extremely suspenseful epic".[8] In 2010, the film was ranked No. 9 in Empire's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema."[9] The website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 100% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 47 reviews, with a weighted average of 8.90/10. Its critics consensus reads: "An existential suspense classic, The Wages of Fear blends nonstop suspense with biting satire; its influence is still being felt on today's thrillers."[10] Metacritic reports a score of 85 out of 100 based on 15 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[11]

The British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan was strongly influenced by The Wages of Fear for his film Dunkirk.[12]

Restoration and home video

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One of the best known and most successful of Clouzot's films, The Wages of Fear has been widely-released on every home video format.[13][14][15] However, with the exception of a French DVD (TF1 Vidéo, 2001) featuring the original 153-minute French theatrical version, until recently most releases only contained a slightly edited 148-minute version. A comprehensive 4K restoration, based on the original negative and supervised by cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman, was completed in 2017.[16] It has greatly improved audio and video quality,[17][18] and has been released on Blu-ray, DVD and DCP in France (TF1 Vidéo), the UK (BFI) and Japan (IVC).

The film was colourised in 1996 with the approval of Clouzot's daughter.[19] It was subsequently broadcast on French television and released on French VHS.[20]

Awards

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Wins

Remakes

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Violent Road (aka Hell's Highway), directed by Howard W. Koch in 1958, and Sorcerer, directed by William Friedkin in 1977, are American remakes, although the former is not credited as such. Friedkin described the latter as an adaptation of the original novel.[24]

The plot was adapted for an episode of the 1980s American TV series MacGyver, "Hellfire" (S01E08).[25][26]

A third remake was released in late March 2024 by Netflix. Directed by Julien Leclercq, the new film stars Franck Gastambide, Alban Lenoir, Ana Girardot and Sofiane Zermani.[27]

References

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  1. ^ "Le Salaire de la Peur". British Film Institute. London. Archived from the original on 14 January 2009. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  2. ^ a b "Le Salaire de la peur (1953)". jpbox-office.com. 2014. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  3. ^ "The Wages of Fear". rottentomatoes.com. 1 January 1953. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  4. ^ "Le Salaire de la peur (1953)". jpbox-office.com. 2014. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  5. ^ "1953 at the box office". Box Office Story.
  6. ^ Pauline Kael (1991). 5001 Nights at the Movies. New York: Holt Paperbacks. p. 821. ISBN 978-0-8050-1367-2.
  7. ^ Roger Ebert (6 March 1992). "The Wages of Fear Movie Review (1955)". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  8. ^ Maltin, Leonard (2013). Leonard Maltin's 2014 Movie Guide. Penguin Press. pp. 1512. ISBN 9780451418104.
  9. ^ "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema: 9. The Wages of Fear". Empire. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  10. ^ "The Wages of Fear (1953)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Retrieved 16 December 2020.
  11. ^ "The Wages of Fear (1953) Reviews". Metacritic. Red Ventures. Retrieved 16 December 2020.
  12. ^ Leonard Pearce (28 February 2017). "Christopher Nolan Inspired by Robert Bresson and Silent Films for 'Dunkirk,' Which Has "Little Dialogue"". The Film Stage. The Film Stage, L.L.C. Retrieved 23 September 2021. When asked about the Henri-Georges Clouzot masterpiece, Nolan said the following: "Yes, The Wages of Fear. Most of the crew didn't understand why I was screening them this movie. But it was the one that made the most sense. Pure suspense. Which talks about mechanics, procedure and physical difficulties. Look at the scene where the truck has to go back on the platform and the wheels doesn't respond anymore … That's what I had to look for Dunkirk! I wanted to show how you bring a truck on the jetty, what happens when the tires don't pass, when the wheels no longer respond. Pure physics."
  13. ^ "The Wages of Fear LaserDiscs". LaserDisc Database.
  14. ^ "The Wages of Fear DVD comparison". DVDCompare.
  15. ^ "The Wages of Fear Blu-ray comparison". DVDCompare.
  16. ^ "Interview: Guillaume Schiffman". Ecran Total.
  17. ^ "The Wages of Fear Blu-ray comparison". Caps-a-holic.
  18. ^ "Le salaire de la peur Blu-ray Test". DVDClassik.
  19. ^ "Le Salaire de la peur: Mais de quelle couleur étaient-ils donc?". Le Camion Club de France.
  20. ^ "Le salaire de la peur VHS". Amazon.fr.
  21. ^ "3rd Berlin International Film Festival: Prize Winners". Berlin International Film Festival. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  22. ^ "Festival de Cannes: The Wages of Fear". Cannes Film Festival. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  23. ^ "Film in 1955". BAFTA.org.
  24. ^ William Friedkin, The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir, HarperCollins Publishers, 2013. Memoir of the director.
  25. ^ "MacGyver: Hellfire". macgyveronline.com. Retrieved 16 March 2022.
  26. ^ "Hellfire". IMDb. Retrieved 16 March 2022.
  27. ^ "Netflix Remaking French Classic 'The Wages Of Fear' With Julien Leclercq At Helm; Unveils First Look". IMDb. Retrieved 27 August 2023.
  1. ^ The title is sometimes also translated as “The Salary of Fear”
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