J Paul Johnson
Has anyone, anywhere ever watched Henri-Georges Clouzot’s brilliant, pulse-pounding 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear and thought to themselves, I wish this film were a little better? Not likely. The only scenario I can imagine is if they were seeing a substandard print. The Wages of Fear itself could hardly be any better at what it does, charting the soily, oily saga of four desperate, downtrodden men on what could best be described as a suicide mission: trekking two creaky trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over craggy, mountainous terrain. With a remastering and re-release on 4K (and Blu-ray) disc, The Criterion Collection gives The Wages of Fear a new look: every sweaty pore, speck of dust, and gob of oil is rendered in pristine detail. And it is, for the effort, just a bit better.
Clouzout’s classic takes place in a dilapidated small town in an unnamed South American country where the only thriving business is an American oil company. Everyone, including a gaggle of unemployed foreigners, lives in squalor, sweating out the heat and dreaming up schemes to earn enough cash for their next drink. Among them is Frenchman Mario (the singer Yves Montand in a role that earned him a newfound respect as a dramatic actor), every bit as down on his luck as the others. He has the fervent attention of barmaid Linda (Véra Clouzot, the director’s wife) but little else to his name other than a keepsake French metro ticket he keeps framed above his bed: a signifier of a way out, a path to better times.
Clouzout lets us languish along with Mario and the others for a good long bit, setting the stage for what’s to come. The arrival of Monsieur Jo (Charles Vanel), a criminal type once acquainted with Mario, sets the plot into a second gear: he shows up with a decent suit, a few dollars to his name, no visa, and no shortage of bravado. Jo looks to Mario’s roommate, the laborer Luigi (Folco Lulli), as a potential mark, but soon, a more enticing opportunity knocks. Southern Oil Company foreman Bill O’Brien (William Tubbs) needs four drivers for an important task when a drilling fire kills dozens and threatens the company’s production. O’Brien schemes to hire local bums—those without union representation or even family to know should they disappear—for the task. The SOC will pay each driver $2,000, a princely sum. The hitch: they have to cart 200 gallons of nitroglycerine over switch-backed mountain roads to blow out the company’s fire. The experts advise the task is likely impossible.
Despite his age, Jo angles to get himself picked for the job, as does Mario and, his own health declining from the constant inhalation of cement dust, Luigi. Luigi is paired with upright German Bimba (Peter Van Eyck) in one truck, Jo and Mario in the other, and the bulk of the film’s narrative action follows the four men as they ferry their explosive cargo across the mountains to their destination. Here The Wages of Fear is a masterclass in suspense as Clouzout—using in these sequences only simple practical effects, no music nor nondiegetic sound at all—sets the theater on tenterhooks with each new obstacle the men encounter. Will they accelerate in time past the jittery washboard? Navigate a tricky J-turn on a jerry-rigged wooden platform? Get unstuck from an oily quagmire? All without setting off an explosion big enough to kill all four men?
That Clouzout can create that much suspense from such a simple narrative setup remains remarkable, even more than 70 years after The Wages of Fear‘s release. Even a simple shot of a cable hook weakening is fraught with enough peril to make one feel the same tension his worried characters do. (A recent remake on Netflix proved little other than the timeless mastery of Clouzout’s original.) Suffice it to say that for Jo, Mario, and the others, their situation goes from bad to worse, and even a savvy, surprisingly dizzying ending wraps up the matter in a neatly ironic bow that rejects the commonplace of the happy ending endemic to most cinema of the era.
John Huston’s American classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for those who don’t know The Wages of Fear, is a recognizable point of comparison. It too featured men desperate for money, embarking on a fool’s errand for their lack of it, mistakenly assuming it will solve their problems and salve their egos, even as the audience recognizes all along that their lives are entirely disposable. Huston’s film is a bit more taut, and perhaps more thematically complex than Clouzout’s, but the French film’s set sequences are spectacularly riveting, so much so that they practically define classical suspense cinema. Certainly, anyone who admires The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—and who doesn’t?—will find The Wages of Fear equally exhilarating and engaging.
As I wrote in a piece on Film Obsessive’s 2022 Labor Day Film Recommendations, “So tense is The Wages of Fear you might overlook its anti-corporate message: that the American company whose oil field is aflame is already well known for its unethical practices and exploitation of local labor, that the job assigned to the four drivers is considered way too dangerous for their own more-valuable unionized employees. Corporations are all too quick to exploit non-unionized workers, especially in underdeveloped nations (the film is set in an unspecified Latin American country), all too eager to let the poor gamble their health, their lives, to preserve the company’s profit. But Clouzot doesn’t exactly idolize the type of men willing to take these assignments, either, making The Wages of Fear a more ideologically complex film than most simple anti-capitalist fare.”
The film has a long tenure in the Collection, dating way back to its 1990s laserdisc era and sporting spine #36 as a DVD release in 2005, from which most of this special edition’s featurettes remain extant. Their 2009 Blu-ray featured excellent audio and visual quality and was, as is this, a significant upgrade. This new release was undertaken by TF1 Studio in collaboration with La Cinèmatheque française from the original 35mm camera negative and, in some sections, a 35mm positive, resulting in the addition of four minutes of restored footage. Except for a few sequences, it looks like it was made yesterday.
Special Features
Criterion’s new packaging, replete with handsome new cover art by Juan Esteban RodrÃguez replacing the iconic close-up of Montand and Vanel, ensconces two discs—one 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray disc with the film and special features—in the company’s signature jewel-case packaging with an expanded 40-page booklet. The booklet contains the same excellent primer written by Dennis Lehane from Criterion’s prior releases but also presents an excellent new compilation of reminiscences from interviews with Clouzot, Montand, and several other of the film’s cast, crew, and associates.
Criterion’s accompanying featurettes, as is the case with most of their catalog 4K upgrade re-releases, remain limited to those on the prior 2005 DVD and 2009 Blu-ray releases, with one notable new exception: a program on the film’s 4K restoration recorded in 2017 when this restoration was completed. It’s been an eight-year wait for this new remaster to be released on physical media; even so, it’s a pleasure to see it now in the Collection.
- “Courage and Clouzout:” Interview with Michel Romanoff: Clouzot’s assistant director on this, Diabolique, and The Spies reminisces about the film’s two-year shoot in southern France in this 22-minute interview recorded in Paris in 2005. The interview is conducted in English and supplemented with various still photos, publicity materials, and film clips. As is per usual, Criterion does not provide subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for its English-language supplements: it’s a fact I point out with every review and a policy I hope that the company eventually changes.
- “Framing the Human Soul”: Interview with Marc Godin: Godin, the co-author of director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s illustrated biography Clouzout: Cinéaste, provides his perspective on Clouzout’s apprenticeship and progress through the industry up to and even following The Wages of Fear in this ten-minute interview, also recorded in Paris in 2005 and like Romanoff’s, complemented with still photos, publicity images, and short film clips. Godin’s interview is conducted in French with English subtitles.
- Interview with Yves Montand: The actor—known then only as a singer and without significant experience as a dramatic actor—had quit making movies, dissatisfied with his reputation as a teen idol, before Clouzout cast him in The Wages of Fear. Ann Andreu interviews Montand in a five-minute clip, in French with English subtitles, for the French television program Cinéma cinémas, from 1988, as the actor reminisces about his casting and experience on set with Clouzout.
- “Henri-Georges Clouzot: The Enlightened Tyrant: This 2004 52-minute documentary may be melodramatic in its approach—practically feverish in its florid prose—but it’s an enlightening and thorough presentation of Clouzout’s life and art, featuring interviews with the director’s second wife Inés, brother Marcel, actors like Cecile Aubry and Brigitte Bardot, assistant director Romanoff, and many more. The documentary is produced in French, by Open Art Productions, as a part of a series called Ces messiures de la famille, with English subtitles.
- “Censored”: This 12-minute mini-documentary produced by Criterion for its 2009 Blu-ray release explores the rationale behind its bowdlerized initial 1955 American release, one which cut some 50 minutes of content from the version that had premiered at Cannes two years earlier. Wary of Montand and Clouzout’s reported left-leaning politics and the film’s indictment of American capitalism, as well as concerns about suggestions of homosexuality. A review in Time Magazine even went so far as to call it “one of the most evil ever made,” warning of its anti-American sentiments. This program presents a scholarly analysis of those cuts made to the film for its 1955 U.S. release, ones which have now all been restored in this new 4K restoration. In English; no SDH are available.
- “The Wages of Fear: The Restoration”: An eight-minute mini-documentary charting the process of scanning the delicate nitrate original and removing noise and other artifacts from the resultant 13-terabyte data file, which is then treated, frame-by-individual-frame, to address faults and gaps in a 500-hour process. I find this kind of material especially instructive and wish it were available on more of Criterion’s upgrade discs: film restoration is as delicate a fine art as filmmaking itself and deserves more attention.
- Two Trailers are additionally provided: one for the film’s original theatrical release and a second from Janus Films for this 2017 restoration.
