Henri-Georges Clouzot makes suspense out of people who understand the danger and have to proceed anyway. We recommend his hard, patient thrillers, with one reservation: he can spend longer establishing human misery than we need to grasp it.
Fi1m perspective
In The Wages of Fear (1953), trucks carrying nitroglycerine have to cross roads that would be difficult with nothing on board. Henri-Georges Clouzot gives us a danger we can understand and then makes us wait while men attempt to manage it. We were frightened by how much care the driving required, and by the knowledge that care might still not be enough. This is the Clouzot we recommend without hesitation: patient, exact and attentive to the people he puts in danger. The suspense depends on knowing whose nerve we trust.
The provincial deceit of Le Corbeau (1943) and the police story of Quai des Orfèvres (1947) came before the dangerous journey. Both belong to a career persistently concerned with human weakness, though Clouzot’s bleak view of people leaves room for dark humour. The risk with such a director is that everyone becomes equally unpleasant and we cease to care what happens to them. In the work we value most, he takes the trouble to show why one man’s judgement of another matters.
In The Wages of Fear, Clouzot and fellow screenwriter Jérôme Géronimi adapt Georges Arnaud’s novel by giving the men’s relationships time to develop before the journey. The opening leaves them in a tropical town with almost nothing and little reason for confidence. We learn how they assess one another, which matters when they will need somebody else to keep his nerve. But the waiting goes on too long, and the film could lose some of that preliminary misery without making their predicament less clear. Clouzot earns our concern well before he is willing to move on.
Les Diaboliques (1955) continued the claustrophobic suspense, but the later work offers a change of subject. The Mystery of Picasso (1956) watches Picasso paint; La Vérité (1960) is a courtroom drama with Brigitte Bardot. The documentary is a useful reminder that he could be interested in someone doing something other than suffering. Start with The Wages of Fear, and allow the stretch in town a little more patience than it deserves.
Biography
Henri-Georges Clouzot was a French film director, screenwriter and producer. He was born on 20 November 1907 in Niort and died on 12 January 1977 in Paris.
Clouzot directed, wrote the screenplay for and produced The Wages of Fear (1953). He is also known for directing and writing Le Corbeau (1943), Quai des Orfèvres (1947), Manon (1949), Les Diaboliques (1955) and La Vérité (1960).
