The Wages of Fear

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.

The movie is a grueling ordeal before the long truck haul begins. 

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 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.