A masterpiece by Henri-Georges Clouzot, “The Wages of Fear” has not aged a bit since its triumphant release 70 years ago. If it was also a great success in the United States, the film was largely amputated there.
In Las Piedras, a lost corner of Central America, a sort of border town with a hybrid population, there is a lack of work. Under the sun, everyone drowns their boredom in alcohol. Not far from there, the SOC, an American oil company, makes hiring rain and shine.
One day, she asks for four volunteers to drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerin to put out the fire in a well located 500 kilometers away. For 2,000 dollars, Mario, Jo, Luigi and Bimba embark on this journey at the risk of their lives…
A fatal odyssey of four characters on the edge of the abyss directed by a Henri-Georges Clouzot at the height of his art, The Wages of Fear, broadcast this evening on Arte, has not aged a bit since its release, there are 70 years.
Breathtaking thriller shot not in Central America but reconstituted in the Camargue, the film will be a triumph in French cinemas, with 7 million admissions, in addition to winning the Grand Prix (ancestor of the Palme d’Or) at the Cannes Film Festival. in 1953, as well as a Golden Bear at the Berlinale for the filmmaker.
The backdrop of the film is also completely in line with political news: the stranglehold of American oil companies on local resources, by exploiting local workers who are paid a pittance.
The violently anti-capitalist discourse against an America that devours the small nations of Central America will precisely not really be to the liking of the country of Uncle Sam, as the Time in his review of the film, which wrote that it was “from one of the most evil films ever made”. For the anecdote, it will even be banned from screening in Guatemala…
When it was released in 1955 in a very puritanical America, The Wages of Fear was amputated by its DCA distributor by 55 minutes (and not by 43 min), drastically reducing the film to its simple spectacular dimension, also expurgating the subtle innuendoes homosexuals, between the characters of Mario (Yves Montand) and Jo (Charles Vanel). It was not until the early 1990s, thanks to the US cinephile publisher par excellence, Criterion, that the American public discovered the film in its entirety.