Henri-Georges Clouzot’s suspense ordeal is back, with additional minutes of footage and remastered in flawless 4K. Few films express such a poisonous attitude about humanity: for four desperate men, the only way to escape a South American backwater is to volunteer for a veritable suicide mission, driving truckloads of nitroglycerine up a punishing mountain road. Clouzot’s film so strongly indicts economic exploitation by multi-national companies, that the U.S. release was held up for two years, and even then censored by fifty minutes. Star Yves Montand’s career got a fresh start with a film acknowledged as an incomparable masterpiece of misanthropy.

The Wages of Fear 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 36
1953 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 105 (?) 131 147 152 156 min. / La salaire de la peur / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date March 4, 2025 / 49.95
Starring: Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Véra Clouzot, Peter Van Eyck, Folco Lulli, William Tubbs, Jo Dest, Luis DeLima.
Cinematography: Armand Thirard
Art Director: René Renoux
Film Editors: Madeleine Gug, Etiennette Muse, Henri Rust
Original Music: Georges Auric
Adapted by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jérôme Géronimi from the novel by Georges Arnaud (Henri Girard)
Produced by Raymond Borderie, Henri-Georges Clouzot
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Were European audiences of 1953 really ready for Henri-Georges Clouzot’s blistering action drama The Wages of Fear?  American audiences certainly weren’t. In just its first two or three minutes, the film puts sordid content on the screen that simply didn’t fly under the Production Code, a catalog of things simply not tolerated in American movies. The gate of a U.S. Oil Company working abroad is manned by armed guards. A naked boy plays in the oily mud of an adjoining shanty town, tormenting a string of cockroaches. Jobless men sit around a café, swearing and spitting on the floor. One idler pesters a woman washing laundry with indecent suggestions. Another loafer induces a cleaning woman to steal for him. She crawls to his chair, and lets him pet her like a dog. Her loutish boss orders her upstairs, clearly for sex. It’s all in sweaty, dirty B&W.

In 1953, America’s idea of entertainment featuring tough men in less-than-honorable situations was John Huston’s  The Treasure of Sierra Madre. Prospectors in Mexico are cheated by crooks and threatened by bandits, but they team together in a spirit of adventure. The adventurers in The Wages of Fear are an international group of losers, trapped in a remote backwater with no way to earn money and no way out. They’re so desperate, even the decent ones are ready to take unreasonable chances.

The Wages of Fear appeared in the middle of a Cold War battle between our State department and the communist Soviets, who flooded film festivals with anti-U.S. messages. Our representatives condemned the Russian drama  Silver Dust, that characterized the United States as racists using atomic evil to threaten the Third World. Washington’s right-wingers claimed that Hollywood itself was a hotbed of communist subversion. Numerous American filmmakers had been jailed or blacklisted; directors Jules Dassin, Edward Dmytryk, Joseph Losey, John Berry and Cy Endfield made films that dramatized conditions reported every day in newspapers:  prison injustice,  police corruption,  distrust of the law,  vigilante lynchings. All were labeled as dangerously anti-American; all fled to Europe.

Our State Department also discouraged the import of European films considered too Left-wing. It was known that the star of The Wages of Fear, along with his actress wife, were outspoken promoters of the communist cause in France. The film made such a big splash in film festivals that it couldn’t be blocked entirely. The thriller did receive a release in the United States, but only after a two-year delay, and after fifty minutes of content was excised.

The Wages of Fear was adapted from a book by Georges Arnaud, a Frenchman who witnessed oppressive conditions in a Venezuelan mining region. The film version shares the book’s political outrage, but is so powerful that not all reviewers noticed its anti-Capitalist theme. The tough, exciting show is a meat grinder of suspense, a grim ordeal with a philosophy of universal bleakness. There are no heroes among these desperate men risking death for a grubstake paycheck.

Las Piedras is a remote oil town in an unnamed South American country. Dozens of unemployed foreigners are stranded there. The only way in or out is by plane, and raising the airfare is not easy. Few of the ‘bums’ in town have any means of earning money — the sole employer is the Southern Oil Company (SOC) and they aren’t hiring. Some of the vagrants are ex-employees fired by the SOC and ‘thrown away.’  Some are just unlucky. The few with a meager source of income watch the others suffer.

Ex-criminal Monsieur Jo (Charles Vanel) arrives as broke as the others, and links up with his fellow penniless Frenchman Mario (Yves Montand). The good-looking Mario mistreats Linda (Véra Clouzot), a maid for the local saloon keeper, Hernandez (Dario Moreno). Jo and Mario put the touch on Mario’s roommate Luigi (Folco Lulli), a bricklayer with respiratory issues. The only other stranded foreigner with a job is the Dutchman Bimba (Peter van Eyck), who drives a taxi for Hernandez.

A major emergency changes everything. A fire at an SOC oil-rig has killed a dozen and threatens a slowdown in crude production. The proper way to extinguish the blaze  costs money, but the SOC execs back in the U.S. expect foreman O’Brien (William Tubbs) to find a less expensive ‘creative’ solution.

O’Brien locates 200 gallons of poorly-stored, highly explosive liquid nitroglycerine. He then offers the suicidal job of transporting the nitro to the unemployed foreigners, as if bestowing a favor. The reasoning is that they have no union and nobody will miss them should they get blown to bits. O’Brien’s experts advise him that that outcome is almost a certainty, but what does he have to lose?  The SOC will not blame him for trying. They have already blamed the deadly oil fire on its dead and maimed victims.

Anyone aware of how a business can cut corners on safety or environmental regulations will be open to writer Georges Arnaud’s misanthropic view of human nature, whenever money and profits are on the line. As expected, the stranded men see the job offer as a chance for a ticket out of Last Piedras. The men compete and cheat one another to be picked to drive two trucks up to the oil camp. One man even commits murder to secure a slot. Another man kills himself.

Sentimentality has no place in this film’s worldview. Desperation does not bring out good qualities in these men. Monsieur Jo becomes more ruthless and brutal. The handsome Mario is almost sadistic in his treatment of the devoted, pitiful Linda. Both men have driving experience, and pass O’Brien’s ‘audition’ for the job. The soft-hearted Luigi and the proud loner Bimba win the coveted positions in truck number two.

This unstable foursome must work as a team, reminding us of other stories about factious male groups under pressure. Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix has some similarities, and Sam Peckinpah plays with similar themes in his  The Wild Bunch. He even borrows the ugly metaphor of insects being tormented in close-up. But Wages of Fear is bleaker than either of those films, both of which display conventional sentimentality.

For the uncompromising Clouzot nobody exists in a state of grace. He insists that the profit motive erodes human dignity. In Las Piedras one company controls everything. The have-nots starve and the haves look the other way. The trapped vagrants have abandoned their ethics. Nobody is innocent, not even the orphans that play naked in the rancid puddles, like pigs. In a scene shocking for 1953, Linda prays at an altar at the base of a tree, and slowly discovers that a man has hung himself behind the statue of Jesus.

We spend an hour-plus in the squalid purgatory of Las Piedras, with the frustration and hopelessness. The emergency truck mission makes us anxious for a chance of escape. The four that go make quick arrangments to cooperate with each other, and even that seems too much to ask. All are scared to death. We’re surprised when Monsieur Jo reveals himself as the driver most shaken by the ordeal. The simple fact is that a truck could blow up at any moment, almost without a reason. Jo can’t intimidate the nitroglycerine, buy it off or betray it. His stone-cold nerve starts to fray.

The uphill ordeal is one of the most impressive extended suspense sequences ever. It’s not a race, as the trucks must be driven at specific speeds to avoid jarring their delicate cargo. Fate puts daunting obstacles in their path. A giant boulder must be removed with explosives. A hairpin turn next to a cliff can be navigated only by backing the trucks out onto a crumbling wooden platform. The men hold up well considering the constant threat of being blown to smithereens, even Jo, for the most part. But the pressure reveals his macho posturing to be a bluff; when their luck goes bad, even Mario’s bullying can’t keep Jo from whimpering in fear.

The traditional pattern for male adventures usually demonstrates that any hardship can be overcome, that group loyalty and sacrifice can redeem the worst of men. The Wages of Fear refuses to play that game. Critics associate the pervading pessimism with a postwar fatalism. European recovery was slow, and haunted by the guilty knowledge that life has not improved, that crimes have gone unpunished and the old patterns of injustice have returned. Was all idealism just an illusion?  It’s the situation that helped form postwar notions of existentialism — with man alone in an amoral, uncaring universe.

The Wages of Fear hasn’t much praise for human nature; men may collaborate on a common goal, but real selflessness is a rarity. H.G. Clouzot’s first masterpiece was the poison-pen drama  Le Corbeau; an equally misanthropic look at ‘a quaint small community.’  In Wages, any camaraderie is worse than an illusion: it’s a joke. The film makes its extreme case without uttering a single political speech, yet we walk away with a profound distrust of the profit motive and the corporate mindset.

Conservatives will admire Clouzot’s movie even as they brand it consider it propaganda, a film with ‘dangerous ideas’ and radical attitudes. It’s also genuinely mean-spirited, in its refusal to see value in people in general. Clouzot takes the theme all the way. He doesn’t end like The Wild Bunch, with loving cameo portraits of his leading characters. Instead, Wages purposely dashes audience expectations, offering a happy ending and then snatching it away. The director wants his adventure film to have the most downbeat finale imaginable.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Wages of Fear 4K, from a new 4K restoration, is a complete re-fit of this classic, an original still unsurpassed in power and impact. It’s one of those movies that might influence a person’s mindset.

The show feels cleaner and more stable than previous encodings. The picture always looked good but now it really snaps to life. The views of the squalid town are more detailed. We see more texture in the excellent sets and exteriors. The extras tell us that parts of France like the Camargue stand in for a South American plain. The collection of hardbitten tough guys, unkempt and unshaved, are the most impressive we’ve seen.

The video extras on the Blu-ray disc appear to be the same selection from earlier Criterion releases. A 2004 French documentary on the career of director Henri-Georges Clouzot recounts the hard times when he was accused of collaboration and banned from working for two years. Clouzot’s brother and writing partner, his second wife, and actors like Brigitte Bardot testify to his character and talent. Great film clips are offered from other Clouzot pictures, including an interesting selection in which Peter Ustinov is seen acting in French. But viewers who have not seen the masterpiece  Les Diaboliques should be warned that a film clip spoils one of its key scenes.

We learn that Wages’ American distributor was the tiny company DCA, that is now associated with less prestigious genre imports from  England and  Japan. An extra called Censored isolates some of the scenes dropped by DCA’s revision, which we are told removed 50 full minutes of content. Although much footage was trimmed simply to knock down the film’s running time, the snippets offered here suggest a political motivation. The domestic cut eliminates SOC foreman O’Brien’s callous announcement of his decision to put men in harm’s way for expediency’s sake. Should the ‘bums’ in the village be blown to bits, they have no relatives to cause trouble later on.

Actually, the charge that the film was bowdlerized specifically to remove anti-American content is hard to prove, as no cutting can remove the basic situation of a Yankee oil company exploiting a captive work force. The shorter cut doesn’t make the drivers seem any nobler, either; they are actively complicit in their own degradation.

The trims include moments of tenderness and physical contact between the drivers. The featurette’s editorial implication is that homosexual overtones were being removed, when one can also argue that the moments were inessential and easy to drop. The same goes for Jo’s final bleak assessment of human dreams, his vision of the afterlife: “Nothing! Nothing!”  I’m personally prone to believing that anti-capitalist, anti-church, and existentialist speeches would be targeted for removal, but the marching orders were to hack down a picture running over 2.5 hours. DCA’s editors were likely throwing out footage like sailors lightening a sinking ship.

On the other hand, you can bet your SOC Employee of the Month pin that blasphemous suicide at the altar was the first thing to go.

Interviews new and archival are included with assistant director Michel Romanoff, author Marc Godin, and star Yves Montand. The insert booklet presents a perceptive essay by author Dennis Lehane, and restores the interview excerpts with cast and crewmembers omitted from the earlier Blu-ray edition. We are told that the oil in the horrible oil-muck sequence was actual petroleum, which makes my skin crawl in sympathy for actor Charles Vanel. Is that even possible?

The new cover art by Juan Esteban Rodríguez is a beauty; we wish that more Criterion cover art was available for sale in poster form.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Wages of Fear 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent +
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Interviews with assistant director Michel Romanoff and Marc Godin, biographer of director Henri-Georges Clouzot
Interview with actor Yves Montand (1988)
Documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot: The Enlightened Tyrant (2004)
Featurette Censored, an analysis of cuts made to the film for its 1955 U.S. release
Program on the 4K restoration
Trailers
Full-length illustrated insert booklet with an essay by Dennis Lehane and a compilation of interviews with the cast and crew.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 19, 2025
(7300fear)

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