and
The Appropriate Tune - "Bombtrack" by Rage Against the Machine
Not much comes to mind in the preamble. I’ve already talked about the enormous influence the French people have had on the creation and development of film as an artistic medium, and that they’re just about the only non-English speaking country I can rely on for a science fiction film or an animated movie that isn’t China or Japan, so I don’t feel like repeating myself like usual. Rather I will just say that this film has been on the radar as far back as the start of this blog if I recall right, and I’m glad that I can finally cross it off the old bucket queue. A bucket queue, to be clear, is like a bucket list but a lot nerdier, and with less Morgan Freeman.
Released in 1953, The Wages of Fear was directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, written by Clouzot and Jerome Geronimi and produced by Raymond Borderie, based on “Le Salaire de la peur” by Georges Arnaud. Yves Montand stars as Mario, a French lothario and immigrant stuck in a town somewhere in South America, which like many South American towns is incredibly poor, underdeveloped and currently being exploited by a U.S. oil company. With no jobs available to make money and thus no money to leave, Mario wiles away his days bumming around with the other immigrants, stealing cigarettes from the local tavern and shtupping the local barmaid. With the arrival of the elder, cool and collected Jo (Charles Vanel) however, Mario finally has a fellow Frenchman to spend some time with, not to mention a man who has the wherewithal to make enough dough to get them out of that hell hole and back to France. Of course Jo doesn’t have any money either, having dropped the last of it on his plane ticket to get there, but it’s only a matter of time before something comes along.
Then, miraculously, something does come along in the form of a horrific pipeline explosion. The guys running the pipeline conclude that the only way to curtail the fire is by using a large amount of nitroglycerine to snuff the fire out with an even bigger explosion. Thing is, the only way to get the nitroglycerin to the location is transporting it by truck, and given the state of the roads (part of that whole ‘forcibly underdeveloped’ thing) any driver who takes a pothole the wrong way or zigs when they should have zagged runs the very real risk of violent death. But hey, that’s why you have a reserve pool of labor, am I right? Just offer the right amount of money, 2,000 dollars for example, and you’ll have people lining up around the block to sign up for your suicide mission. So it is that four men -- Mario, Jo, the coincidentally named Luigi (Folco Lulli) and the stoic Bimba (Peter Van Eyck) are chosen to drive the two trucks. To collect their...wages of fear.
The Wages of Fear is a film built on a foundation of suspense. If you’ve ever watched a scene in a movie where somebody is running away from a vicious killer who seems to appear around every corner, or they have to deactivate the villain’s superweapon before it unleashes chaos upon the world, imagine that scene spread out over 70 percent of the movie. Every bump in the road or engine shudder could be the prelude to death, and events which in any other scenario would be minor hurdles or inconveniences are almost insurmountable obstacles. That’s an insane amount of pressure, and the film is built around how our four characters deal/degrade under that stress. All of which Clouzot presents with this stark intensity that would make Sergio Leone nod his head in approval.
Of course suspense works best when the audience sympathizes with the characters, but I don’t know if Wages of Fear does that. Mario and Jo are toxic shitheads at the start of the movie and turn that toxicity towards each other as the movie goes on, and even if it tries to turn that around and imply a genuine bond by the end of the film it never rang true for me, because while Imay not have wanted them to die I actually was not invested in their success. In fact Clouzot ends up watering down his ‘corporate indifference to human suffering in the pursuit of profit’ message to a less engaging ‘everything sucks’ angle; Everyone is ignorant and callous, and the few people who aren’t are derided and punished for it. It’s a very dour film, with the kind of ending that Ingmar Bergman would’ve been proud of. All of which would have likely been regarded as rather profound in the post-WWII period when that generation was still reeling from collective shellshock, but nowadays seem to exude an air of juvenile nihilism. Rather than making me think it feels more like it’s making me check and see if I refilled my antidepressant prescription.
I guess I didn’t though, because despite my eagerness to watch this in the beginning I find I have nothing really to say about it. The Wages of Fear has one thing that it does very well, I’ll give it that, but connecting with the film on an emotional level (at least for a first viewing) didn’t really happen. The acting was fine, the music was fine, the cinematography was damn good, but I didn’t really feel anything by the end of the film except the mild dissatisfaction one gets from calling a scene minutes before it happens. Damned by simplicity.
I can still recognize why it's regarded as highly as it is however, so I’m letting it pass with a mild recommendation. If you’re a film major in college you might have a time with this, maybe namedrop it in class to get some points with the professor, or if you need a different kind of thriller then you might pop this in, but I can’t say for sure that this is a movie I feel like coming back to any time soon. That’s just the way she goes sometimes, although not too fast or she’ll fucking explode.
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