The Wages of Fear Review

Clouzot's first act parks the camera in Las Piedras, a heat-struck company town with an airstrip nobody can afford to use, and lets Yves Montand's Mario, Charles Vanel's Jo, Folco Lulli's Luigi and Peter van Eyck's Bimba bicker, strut and go hungry while an American oil company runs everything from behind its compound wall. It is slow, and it is meant to be. When the company offers two thousand dollars a man to haul nitroglycerin, you understand why men line up for probable death.

The road is where the film earns Roger Ebert's claim that its suspense sequences belong among the great stretches of cinema. The trucks crawl over the corrugated stretch called the washboard, edge around a rotten platform above a drop and clear a boulder, while Clouzot cuts between wheels, planks and sweating faces until the tension turns physical. Vanel, whose Jo swaggers through the town scenes, is best as a tough guy discovering his nerve has gone; Cannes gave him a special mention.

The politics are sharper than the thriller label suggests, since the company would rather spend drifters than its own unionized men. Véra Clouzot's Linda, though, is barely a character. The film took both the Palme d'Or and the Golden Bear, and William Friedkin's Sorcerer went back to the same novel in 1977.