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The Wages of Fear
Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Correction of two points.
The country is Honduras. The plane arrives from the capital, Tegucigalpa.
The ticket is a Paris Metro (subway) ticket for Place Pigalle station.
A classic suspense masterpiece. Yves Montand's second film.
Rating: - Another masterpiece by Clouzot
Now this one will get your blood flowing! Director Henri-Georges Clouzot plugs this piercing thriller against your skin and screams CLEAR!!!!!! He literally sends jolt after jolt into your brain, this movie is quite a shock to the system.
Four men desperate for money get the high-paying job they've been hoping for. There's only one problem--this job is pretty much suicide. They're asked to transport some explosives across some extremely rugged terrain in Central America.
Their journey is completely action-packed. Sorry, that sentence doesn't do it justice. The mission has moments that hit harder than a right hook from a young Mike Tyson. Seriously, several scenes move with the intensity of Russian Roulette. This movie is considered by many critics to be the most nerve-wracking and exciting films ever made.
The only other work I've seen by Clouzot is Diabolique, which is a great great film. This one is even better in my opinion. It has a shocking, spectacular ending that ranks among the greatest I've seen, up there with Wicker Man and The Vanishing. That's no joke!
I've gotta watch The Raven next, this guy can make some great films.
One final note, this Criterion Edition has no special features. I wish I would have coughed up a few extra bucks and got the updated one, but either way, get your hands on this gem as soon as you can...
Rating:  - Are we having fun, yet ?
My favorite line in it: "By the way, there are no shocks on these rigs. Our trucks don't have none of those modern conveniences."
After all, what's life but a ticket to the theatre in the Pigalle that you neither use or ever get to cash in? But you carry it with you, to hell, thru hell, and back.
Rating: - Another LOST tie in.
I rented and watched this movie becuse the two main creators of LOST mentioned it in a discussion on a podcast. They described Bimba as similar to John Locke. I agree.
This is probably one of the most suspenseful vintiage movies I have ever seen so far. Not that I have seen too many of them. Nevertheless, the movie draws you in as you get closer to the delivery that the four men are taking. Although the beginning shows why these men made their decision it is a bit slow and shows it's age by some of the "classic" acting.
I'm not the best reviewer of movies, but I know what I like. This is one of the best and I can see why the creators of LOST are drawn to it.
Rating: - The slow descent.
The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)
Widely considered Henri-Georges Clouzot's finest film, The Wages of Fear is the story of four poverty-stricken men hired by a rapacious oil company to transport two trucks full of nitroglycerin over three hundred miles of very bad road to an oil well fire. And for what it's worth, the film is very good at what it does; the problem, from the point of view of someone watching it over half a century after its original release, is that it would be very hard to see this film without having heard much of the hype about it beforehand. (One would have to avoid most reviews of the movie, as well as the copy on the DVD case. This is, of course, well nigh impossible.) While it is, in fact, a thriller, it takes more than a few minutes to get rolling (in fact, in the 148-minute restored edition, the guys aren't hired by the oil company for over an hour). Because of this, it seems there are actually two movies here-- one about life in poverty in a nameless South American town (and we've seen that one before, except it was called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), and one about transporting nitroglycerin. The second is the better work by far, an interesting and engaging portrait of four friends and how the stress of the job tests their friendship as much as their nerves. I'm not terribly sure I'd call it a thriller as much as a simple drama; still, it's well worth your time if you're looking for a good, long movie to get yourself absorbed in. *** ½
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