The following notes on The Wages of Fear were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW–Madison. A newly restored 4K DCP of The Wages of Fear will screen on Friday, January 31 in our regular Cinematheque venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!
By Josh Martin
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (La Salaire de la peur, 1953) begins with a startling close-up of a group of cockroaches, wriggling on the ground in a patch of dry dirt. A young boy, naked and unkempt in the streets of an anonymous, dilapidated South American town, pokes at the bugs, helpless to resist this child’s idle prodding. As Clouzot’s camera pans away, our scene is set with brutal clarity, capturing a portrait of dead-end desperation and seemingly boundless misery in miniature. A man, walking on crutches, begs others for just a modicum of help, a crumb to get him through the day. A street cart vendor drones on repeating his call for shaved ice, ignored by all. For seemingly no reason, another man begins pelting an innocent dog with rocks, justifying his inexplicable cruelty by mentioning his hatred of mutts. Dusty, desolate, and unfathomably sweltering, this is as close to hell on earth as it gets.
If we’re stuck in hell, so is Mario Livi, (Yves Montand) a French expat now floating aimlessly in South America, part of a multicultural compendium of penniless men stranded and lazily lounging to pass the time. In a film known for its unbearable suspense, what is so remarkable about The Wages of Fear is how much energy Clouzot dedicates at the outset to charting the contours and limits of its soul-deadening milieu, a world with a surplus of hours in the day and far too little to do. In its relatively languid opening salvo, Clouzot acclimates the viewer to this atmosphere, stifling and delaying the development of narrative progress. This is a hangout film of sorts — yet it is one where the mellow male bonding emerges from a paucity of alternative options, not by choice. “It’s like prison here,” Mario claims, “easy to get in… but no exit.” With merely intermittent employment available, the only thing left to do is fantasize of something — anything — that could provide a rapid escape from this liminal misery.
Enter Jo (Charles Vanel), a dapper Frenchman who carries an air of respectability and panache. Clad in a dapper suit with a fancy chapeau, Jo’s composure allows him to manipulate the world to his advantage — even if, like everyone else, he arrived in this town dead broke. Sparked by a sense of national kinship, Mario and Jo progress from a charming meet-cute to form an immediate and intimate friendship, a connection so strong it sparks some jealousy from Linda (Vera Clouzot), Mario’s tragically neglected lover. Indeed, the bond between Mario and Jo is one that will strike many viewers as surprisingly direct in its homoeroticism, a typically subtextual element in classical cinema routinely elevated to text here.
However, The Wages of Fear, true to its title, is principally about money and the lengths that these men will go to in order to obtain it. In this case, the hunt for a little dough to escape this town requires, quite literally, a death drive, a willingness to be exploited on a mission with life-or-death stakes. The Southern Oil Company, a foreign conglomerate, needs a crew of risk-takers to transport extraordinarily dangerous nitroglycerin to the company’s site — cargo that could suddenly ignite at the tiniest bump or slip-up. Skirting union rules, the SOC’s American representative, O’Brien (William Tubbs), decides to source labor from the town. “Because those bums don’t have any union, nor any families,” O’Brien bellows, “and if they blow up, nobody will come around bothering me for any contributions.” His complete lack of scruples is remarkable — even if he insists on paying these men a small fortune for their efforts.
Amid stiff competition from townsfolk, Mario, Jo, the terminally ill Luigi (Folco Lulli), and the stoic Bilba (Peter van Eyck) emerge as the four lucky men for this mission. As they embark, the film’s formerly leisurely pace gives way to near-relentless tension. Clouzot plays with slowness to maximize this feeling of extreme unease, contrasting the patience and calm demanded from the trip with the apocalyptic ramifications of even the smallest wrong movement. Non-diegetic music virtually vanishes; silence only exacerbates the pervasive threat of an instantaneous, bloody death. Sneering toward Jo, his nerves rattled as the journey grows more harrowing, Luigi exclaims, “Can’t you see he’s just a walking corpse?” The weary Mario can only quip back: “And aren’t we?”
When The Wages of Fear made its debut in 1953 at international film festivals, it was a sensation, with Clouzot winning the Golden Bear at Berlin and the Grand Prix (now the Palme d’Or) at Cannes. Such acclaim did not necessarily prompt an easy road to American screens. As Tino Balio recalls in his exploration of international cinema’s steady emergence in U.S. theaters, Wages was subjected to extensive censorship, mostly related to “the so-called vicious and irresponsible anti-American propaganda” — the suggestion that, perhaps, an American oil company did not possess the noblest of motives. The American distributor DCA agreed to cut forty minutes, a move that enabled Wages to become a major success and a key film in the expansion of French cinema’s North American reach. Of course, cuts to The Wages of Fear’s 152-minute running time may have had a practical purpose as well, as critic Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests: the DCA may have also “simply wanted to pack in more shows per day.” The edits eliminating the distinctive passages of downtime from its looser opening hour, and instead cutting right to the action and maximizing its box office potential. Regardless of the precise motives behind each cut, these economic and political maneuvers chipped away at the unique experience of Clouzot’s film, a travesty mercilessly rectified by more recent restorations and reconstructions.
The Wages of Fear’s impact rippled far beyond its initial triumph in the 1950s. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind recalls a conversation between an aging Clouzot and William Friedkin, hot off the one-two punch of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). When asked by Friedkin for his blessing to direct a remake of Wages of Fear, Clouzot expressed his incredulity: “Billy, you’re being foolish. You’re a bright young guy, what do you want to do this… for?” After some additional pleading, Clouzot acquiesced. “I promise you,” Friedkin slyly swore, “I will not do it as well as you did.” Cinematheque viewers will be able to weigh the veracity of Friedkin’s promise for themselves: Sorcerer screens next Friday, February 7th in 4070 Vilas. Yet regardless of any notion of superiority or inferiority, Friedkin keenly identified the timeless vitality of this nerve-shredding fable. Newly restored in 4K, Clouzot’s pressure-cooker vision of a rotten universe retains its suspense and rarely emulated intensity.