The Wages of Fear

The Wages of Fear is a thriller about driving carefully, and Henri-Georges Clouzot makes the need for care almost unbearable. Trucks have to carry nitroglycerine over roads that would be troublesome with an empty load. The danger is easy to understand, so we can spend our attention on the men obliged to manage it. We recommend it without hesitation, with one warning: it takes a long time to get out of town.

The opening stays with men who have almost nothing, in a tropical town that offers little reason for confidence. Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi, adapting Georges Arnaud’s novel, make their relationships worth watching before putting them under strain. We need to know how these men judge one another, because that judgement will matter when each needs somebody else to keep his nerve. Even so, the waiting goes on longer than it needs to. At 154 minutes, the film could spare some of this preliminary misery without making the men’s predicament any less clear.

Yves Montand and Charles Vanel give the film its most absorbing human friction as Mario Livi and Mr. Jo. Their performances make us watch how much effort goes into appearing dependable, especially when another man is watching. Charles Vanel is particularly good at making fear seem embarrassing as well as frightening. Peter van Eyck’s Bimba and Folco Lulli’s Luigi keep the group from becoming merely a contest between its two most prominent personalities. We watch all four for signs of competence, and become anxious whenever confidence seems to be doing duty for it.

Armand Henri Julien Thirard’s photography makes the rough terrain legible enough for us to worry about it. We look at the road as drivers would, assessing what a surface might do to the load. The editors, Henri Rust, Madeleine Gug and Étiennette Muse, allow the practical business of moving the trucks to occupy an extraordinary amount of attention. A difficult passage is allowed to remain difficult; a cut does not conveniently get the men through it. We have time to understand what they are attempting and how carefully they must proceed.

We found ourselves dreading an ordinary bump in the road. The cargo is so unstable that the act of driving, repeated and examined, becomes enough to frighten us; there is no need to introduce a fresh threat every few minutes. Georges Auric’s score has less work to do than the knowledge of what is in the trucks. Keeping us concerned about the same danger for so long is a considerable achievement. Our attention stays on the road and the men responsible for negotiating it.

The harshness extends beyond the journey. These men are available for dangerous work because desperation has made refusal difficult, and the film gives that fact as much weight as their courage. We understand its anger about exploitation because we have spent time with the people who must do the work. There is something troubling, too, in how readily we settle down to enjoy watching them accept an intolerable risk. The lengthy introduction gives us ample reason to question how freely they have chosen it.

There are thrillers that offer relief through a burst of action; here, we keep hoping the driving will become uneventful. That changes how we watch, making a small practical difficulty worth the attention usually reserved for a confrontation. The long opening remains a reservation, but the driving earns the time it takes. Give it an uninterrupted evening, with somebody who will appreciate being made this uncomfortable.