For the 70th anniversary of The Wages of Fear’s US release, Robert Daniels buckles up and takes us on a journey through the white-knuckle thrills and queer-coded complexities that keep the film relevant today.
An agitated driver’s trembling palms, sweating from white-hot fear, clutch at a steering wheel as they and their vexed engers work their damndest to avoid the certain death that awaits them if they stop. While that tight-knuckle image is the basis of any movie car chase, some pictures have taken it further, building their entire narrative on a murderous stretch of road. Although many films have pushed the concept to great success, for all their beautiful desolation and exasperating anxiety, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953)—a tightly calibrated thriller about two teams of drivers transporting explosives for a big payday—still stands above them as a politically potent and sexually volatile adventure.
The Wages of Fear was so incendiary upon release that it faced censorship in America, ultimately premiering in New York City in 1955 with a 131-minute runtime. Cut from the original 152-minute version were scenes deemed to be anti-American and overtly homosexual. During the 1990s, a 148-minute “Director’s Cut” was released in America and found its way into The Criterion Collection. A 4K restoration in 2017 supervised by cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman offered the complete 152-minute presentation (the new Criterion 4K upgrade features this version). Despite the inaccessibility of the longer cut, The Wages of Fear still became a critical hit. “The excitement derives entirely from the awareness of nitroglycerine and the gingerly, breathless handling of it. You sit there waiting for the theatre to explode,” hailed The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther. Decades later, Roger Ebert, who watched the Director’s Cut, opined, “The film’s extended suspense sequences deserve a place among the great stretches of cinema.”
Indeed, the film still holds a place among contemporary audiences. The Wages of Fear appears at 105 on Letterboxd’s 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Dune director Denis Villeneuve recently selected the film as one of his Criterion Closet picks, calling it, “A master class into screenwriting and how to express storytelling through pure images.” In the decades since its release, The Wages of Fear has been loosely modified (in William Friedkin’s masterpiece Sorcerer) and directly remade (although Julien Leclercq’s 2024 take could be better left skipped, as its 2.0 average rating suggests). As we arrive at the 70th anniversary of the film’s US release, it’s obvious The Wages of Fear’s influence extends far beyond these copies. You won’t find a single road thriller that isn’t significantly indebted to Clouzot’s heart-clenching vision.
Adapted from Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel Le Salaire de la peur, The Wages of Fear was a watershed film for Clouzot. It was his fifth work following a banishment from filmmaking. Though Clouzot was fired years earlier in 1934 for his association with Jewish producers, by the time he recovered in 1939 from tuberculosis—an illness that paused his movie career— was under German rule. A broke Clouzot worked for the German-operated film production company Continental Films through World War II. After his government-mandated two-year exile for his collaboration, Clouzot found mixed success (Jenny Lamour, or Quay of the Goldsmiths, was a major triumph during this time). But it wasn’t until The Wages of Fear—which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and the Palme d’Or at Cannes—that Clouzot firmly established himself as one of the giants of French cinema.
In his five-star review, Matt observes, “A filthy, hostile, and oily (?!) critique of capitalistic plundering of resources in the developing world, and the opportunistic misanthropy that makes it all possible.” It’s that economic critique that not only drives the film’s intense drama—it’s why, more than ever, The Wages of Fear, a high-octane French-language picture, still speaks to viewers. The dire economic situation, predicated by a vast wage gap, exponentially increases the likelihood of these men needlessly risking their lives. Take Mario (Italian crooner-turned-actor Yves Montand), who ventured to the remote, impoverished South American town of Las Piedras to escape , only to discover that once you arrive, you can’t leave.
Las Piedras is surrounded by scorching, arid lands where temperatures reach so high, the locals left the shell of a building incomplete rather than toil in the overwhelming heat. There isn’t much work in the town, apart from odd short-term jobs and the exploitative American-controlled Southern Oil Company (SOC). With exorbitant airfares and no train service, Las Piedras is a prison not unlike the wartime city in Casablanca, except Humphrey Bogart’s cozy gambling t isn’t there to tide over the days. There’s only a local watering hole that Mario’s lover Linda (Véra Clouzot, the director’s real-life wife) cleans, and men like the white-haired Dutchman Bimba (Peter van Eyck) and the Italian cementer Luigi (Folco Lulli) frequent.
The hazardousness of the situation only increases when Jo (Charles Vanel), a hot-headed ex-gangster in a white linen suit on the lam, arrives. Like the town’s other men, a penniless Jo soon realizes the different type of jail he’s trapped in. Clouzot’s camera, particularly in the film’s evocative opening, effectively captures the distressing reality; his wide lens takes in the muddy streets, desperate peddlers, and a hungry kid torturing cockroaches (Sam Peckinpah would later lift this opening for The Wild Bunch). Despite the foreignness of his surroundings, Jo soon finds a familiar face in the French expat Mario. The pair ponder futile escapes from the town, and Jo, armed with a gun, throws his weight among the locals.
Still, they are trapped in a fruitless malaise not unlike the soldiers stranded on the beach in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, an influence Nolan noted. “I really wanted the film to be driven primarily by suspense, which is one of the most pure cinematic film forms,” the director told the Toronto Sun. “So we looked at Hitchcock, but the one that I think I’d point most to is (Henri-Georges) Clouzot’s Wages of Fear… Wages of Fear was the one that we honed in on the most for that language of suspense.”
The relentless tension in The Wages of Fear kicks off when a perilous, expensive fire erupts at an SOC-controlled oil well. The disaster seriously injures and leads to the deaths of many men, and causes several threads to erupt. For one, the specter of a towering burning gas flare bears similarities to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, another film keenly interested in the exploitation of vulnerable workers by craven American industrialists. In one of The Wages of Fear’s most charged sequences, bodies of the workers arrive back in town, inspiring a local woman to stand above an incensed crowd to demand a strike against SOC.
Tellingly, the strike never occurs because the SOC offers the men a near-suicide mission: Hauling nitroglycerin in rickety trucks through a tangled jungle and across a rocky desert terrain to stem the explosion. The rush to volunteer is greater than the anger against the corporation because, for once, the men will be handsomely compensated ($2,000, each, in fact). But only four will be chosen: Bimpa, Luigi, Jo and Mario. While the monetary angst is as rich as oil in The Wages of Fear, it’s not the lone driver of the picture. As Z.K. explains in his review, “There’s a lot of ink already spilled about the film as a resounding indictment of capitalism, but something I always come back to with this film… is the focus on vulnerability. All our central characters represent a kind of zealously hidden vulnerability cached deep within archetypes of masculinity.”
Though the icy Bimpa and the jovial Luigi make for an endearing team, it’s the tenuous partnership shared by Jo and Mario—two men generationally separated—that becomes the focal point of the film’s queer-coded psychosexual drama. Take the evolution of their relationship: when Mario first tells his roommate Luigi about meeting Jo, Luigi asks if he has a date with a woman. “It happens to be a man, a real one,” Mario cooly responds. Before long, Mario begins to ignore Linda in lieu of being with Jo. By the time Jo and Mario are driving together in the truck, however, their relationship begins to fracture. The once confident Jo becomes a bundle of suffocating nerves, while Mario grows obsessive to the point of selfish recklessness during their risky odyssey.
Jo and Mario’s truck becomes another prison, a critique of hard-boiled masculinity whose fingerprints are legible on other films. In Steven Spielberg’s Duel, the unsuspecting salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) instigates an inescapable grudge match against a deadly rusted tanker marked flammable, when he uses his red Plymouth Valiant as a statement of his manliness. Max (Tom Hardy) and Furiosa (Charlize Theron) in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, use their big rig to rescue sex slaves away from the sexually exploitative misogynist Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his heavy-metal army. Stone-faced Canadian trucker Mike McCann (Liam Neeson) melts his hardened exterior by protecting his PTSD and aphasia-afflicted brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas) as their semi races across a frozen tundra to rescue Manitoban miners in The Ice Road.
And yet, few films match the masculine agitation in The Wages of Fear like Michael Mann’s Collateral. In that film, a taxi driver named Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) is forced to guide the platinum-haired hitman Vincent (Tom Cruise) across Los Angeles to his many targets. “Vincent seems to be the shadow of Los Angeles itself, a monster dreamed up by the city’s collective unconscious, who believes in — and represents — the worst aspects of the city,” writes Priscilla Page in her incisive essay. Similarly, Mario, who’s been stranded in Las Piedras far longer than Jo, carries the town’s worst aspects along with him on their journey. He pushes and prods the nervous Jo with the same unblinking viciousness Vincent lords over Max. The nighttime chiaroscuro Max’s cab, in fact, possesses an unnerving claustrophobia, an intentionality that mirrors the nighttime scenes in Jo and Mario’s truck.
With The Wages of Fear, you can even find its set pieces inspiring other movies. One of the film’s most indelible scenes, for instance, sees each team needing to accelerate their trucks to a consistent 40mph, or else they’ll explode. A mixture of clicking, clacking, grinding and revving during the sequence is emblematic of the film’s advanced dynamic sound design to build tension. A similar scenario becomes the primary setup for the Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock action two-hander Speed, wherein Bullock must keep a Los Angeles bus above 50mph or risk detonating a bomb. In another scene, Jo and Mario’s truck slowly ascends a steep, craggy hill toward a rotting wooden platform. In Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, Hollywood gofer Manny Torres (Diego Calva) and a truck driver aren’t transporting nitroglycerin. They’re moving something far more, ahem, explosive, an elephant, to a hilltop showbiz party.
The Wages of Fear, of course, is a far more politically serious affair. It’s no accident that all of the drivers hail from the primary participants in World War II, and they’re operating under the behest of the new world power: the US. America’s exploitation of South America takes center stage, as does its thirst for oil (an appetite that hasn’t abated despite several wars). Myvtt agrees, writing, “Technical beauty aside, adept and incisive exploration about the degradation and exploitation in capitalism, and specifically resource extraction in Latin America.”
In the midst of deeper themes and rumbling motors, however, through Mortand and Vanel’s soulful performances, Clouzot never forgets the human element. The scene of Mario’s muscular frame softly holding an exhausted Jo, both men irreparably blackened on the outside and inside by oil, is one of cinema’s most tender images. “The acting by Yves Montand and Charles Vanel in the final scenes is legendary,” writes Justin Friend. “Yves Montand delivers a magnetic performance as the reckless but resourceful lead, paired with Charles Vanel, whose vulnerability turns their partnership into an emotional anchor amid the chaos,” concurs Bobsoares.
It’s the indelible human relationships like Jo and Mario that make The Wages of Fear more than a meticulously crafted master class in suspense. Clouzot perfectly marries ambitious set pieces to serve both audience excitement and character development, searing these men’s heartless decisions, governed by a cruel economic system, into the deepest reaches of our heart. 70 years later, cinema is still riding the road The Wages of Fear paved.
‘The Wages of Fear’ releases on 4K Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection on March 4, 2025.
