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The Wages of Fear
Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Hollywood Ending
Same material, if it was given to a Hollywood A-list director, one would undoubtedly get an action-packed summer blockbuster, complete with super-duper pyrotechnics, simultaneously impressive and uninspiring stunts and special effects, melodramatic heroism, and perhaps even licensed merchandises at your local burger joint. The slow-burning first half of the movie, which perfectly accentuates the sense of existentialist ennui? Not likely. Hollywood knows what the average attention span of a popcorn muchin', soda guzzling audience is. A subtle sub-context, which extends the surface material to a powerful three-dimensional structure? Sorry, Jose. The big guys want you to watch a movie, forget it, and move on to the next action-packed extravaganza. A decidedly pessimistic, totally ironic ending that pushed the envelope of absurdity? Not a chance. Hollywood folks are such a fun bunch, they want everyone goes home happy. It's quite sickening to see that most movies come out Hollywood are not even bold enough to a story as is, and to portray life as is. Contrary to what Hollywood wanted people to believe, life is not all that happy and cheery. Life is filled with absurdities, cowardice, ennui, and ironic turns of events. What makes this 50 year old movie stands out of a sea of mediocrity, is that it has the audacity to show life's ugly underbelly without a sugar-coated Hollywood ending.
Rating:  - Slow-building suspense thriller with silly ending
Don't get me wrong - this is a great suspense film. However, the suspense of the first hour of the movie is: "is anything going to happen, or are they just going to sit around complaining?" gets off to an incredibly slow start, and I kept wondering if the rest of the film would be worth wading through the beginning. It was.
By the time they get in the trucks, the film has clearly expressed the ennui of living in the middle of nowhere, with nowhere to go and nothing to do. The rest of the film is incredibly suspenseful - moreso than almost any other movie I've seen. In a Hitchcock movie, you know people are going to die, but it won't be the hero. In a French film, anything goes, and any of the characters could die at any time.
I have to other problems with the picture. First (and this may be the fault of the translator) is that some of the reasoning behind some of the characters' choices is unclear. They have to go really fast so that they don't hit bumps? Huh?
The second problem is the ending. It's abrupt, surreal, and frankly it made me laugh out loud (not the intended effect, I'm sure). Sure it's unexpected, but it didn't really seem to gel with the rest of the film.
Overall, though, this is an excellent film, with a solid DVD transfer from Criterion (there's a white line on the left side of the screen in several scenes, but it's not a huge problem).
Rating: - Think "Speed" slowed to a crawl.
Four poor workman from a destitute South American town are hired to drive two tanker trucks of nitroglycerin along an unpaved, narrow mountain road. If they encounter any sort of friction, any bump or disturbance that they cannot handle carefully, then the sensitive cargo in their trucks may explode. Since the cover of the Criterion Collection of THE WAGES OF FEAR DVD features a dead man's head, it's probably not hard to figure out that mishaps ensue on this dangerous trip.
The stress and tension inherent is the pleasure of the movie, though. Every little bump in the road causes the characters' adrenaline to boil, and the audience begins to feel it, too. Though the characters are only narrowly defined as individuals, their travails and near-misses with the trucks keep you on the edge of your seat. With the premise, Clouzot makes tense scenes out of every possible scenario, a narrow turn, a flooded roadway, a strict deadline that dictates the trucks must travel at an unsafe speed. The whole thing is brilliant.
For those of you who liked SPEED, this film ratchets up the same amount of tension by using a reversed scenario. Rather than a bus that can't slow down, it has trucks that cannot speed up.
THE WAGES OF FEAR will completely stress you out, for it draws you in using an unbeatable, somewhat preposterous premise and keeps the audience aware of bumps in the road long before characters face them.
Rating: - nail-biting suspense
This is one of the most suspenseful movies ever made-- once the journey begins, the tension never lets up. Director Clouzot has sometimes been called the French Hitchcock, but Hitchcock was never this gritty or pessimistic. The stark B&W photography only adds to the brutal realism. Make sure you get the full 2 1/2 hour version, as there may be edited versions still out there.
Rating: - An oft-overlooked mindblower of a movie.
If you like tension and drama, and enjoy unique, hard-bitten stories, this is the movie for you.
This is one of the most enjoyable international films I've ever scene. Shortly after The Big One (WW2), desperate men from Germany, France, and Italy are all squashed into a God-forsaken hole of a South American town dead-smack in the middle of nowhere. Their only ticket out is to jump in with the big, fat, tough, rich Yankees who'll give them a local fortune if they have what it takes to deliver nitro over mountain roads to an oil well fire.
Clouzot's direction is outstanding. Even in the comfort of your lazy-boy you'll feel like you're hanging on a cliff with your fingertips. Peter Van Eyck was the driver most interesting to me, because he performed the whole brain-wracking task with a smile on his face and not a care in the world after spending WW2 in a Nazi salt mine.
Criterion Collection version of this movie is much better than the original. The colored subtitles are a good touch, since much of the dialouge was previously lost due to white-colored English subtitles against black-and-white film, which, duh, camoflauges the words when something on the screen is white. The widescreen is good, and the film seems a little cleaned up.
Well worth the collection of a series film fan!
-- JJ Timmins
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