FILM OF THE WEEK: The Wages of Fear (1953)
by Vadim Rizov 
The well known numbers fueling
Henri-Georges Clouzot's
The Wages of Fear, which soon screens in
a new 35mm print at NYC's Film Forum: 148 minutes, two trucks, three hundred miles, four men, lots of nitroglycerin. An oil fire's raging at a far-away outpost, and the Southern Oil Company (which, as Roger Ebert
noted, non-coincidentally has the same initials as Standard Oil) needs explosives to put it out; with roads in this unnamed South American oil republic so unstable the slightest jostle will blow up the truck, it'll take some truly desperate losers to undertake the trip?men like Mario (
Yves Montand) and Luigi (
Folco Lulli). (It's unknown if Nintendo named their video-game duo in deliberate homage.) The former best friends have their relationship torn apart at the film's start by the arrival in town of barrel-chested Jo (
Charles Vanel), who wears his gut as an emblem of old-school masculinity; that and a shared longing for their homeland is enough to draw Mario to his side. The Frenchmen pair up in one truck; blithe Italian Luigi and Bimba (
Peter van Eyck), a former forced-labor Nazi conscript, take the other vehicle, a minor reunion of Axis nationalities.
Audiences have become much more skeptical of the oil industry since 1953:
Wages' critique of American economic imperialism (which earned it
Time magazine's contempt in 1955 as "surely one of the most evil [films] ever made") premiered the same year as
Anthony Mann's
Thunder Bay, which took as its straightforward starting point an unironic celebration of innovations in offshore oil drilling. Films now routinely assume corporations act in bad faith, never more so than when in unregulated foreign parts, making it easier to get less hung-up on the movie's anti-American tendencies (a red herring about how to approach a film that's, as noted by director
Karel Reisz in 1991, "unselectively and impartially anti-everything").
It's evident from the fatalistic title and first shot?a small boy tormenting insects?that everyone on-screen will have to pay for their sins. It's equally obvious that a film running two and a half hours isn't going to be killing its four protagonists off sooner than need be: the film isn't so much suspenseful as it is gleefully sadistic in toying with a cast of characters who deserve death. Even in Clouzot's cynical oeuvre,
The Wages of Fear stands out for its relentless nature: it's not just the terrible, pitiless place they?re trapped in punishing the characters, but the godlike director who treats his characters like insects. He gives them tools to fight back against road blocks and oil slicks: the journey to transport the nitro requires lots of ingenuity, with the trucks' many features alternately turning into unexpected death traps and broken down into Transfomers-components.
Yet cleverness isn't the same as the capacity for empathy, which is what's being punished. Mario comes off the worst of the lot. "You can't imagine the pain," says one character to him while writhing in agony late in the game. "I don?t have the time," he responds contemptuously. No one onscreen does; Clouzot's scorn for everyone includes cynical American manager Billl O'Brien (the aptly named
William Tubbs) and Hernandez, the greasy manager of the only cafe in town (
Dario Moreno) in addition to the four men. Only the generic natives escape contempt; they have no agency in their exploitation. Everyone else has no business being in town, but their unearned sense of superiority by birthright dooms them. Rarely has angry anti-neocolonialist sentiment and full-bore nihilism played so entertainingly.
Posted by ahillis at December 7, 2011 6:00 AM
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