directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi
based on the novel by Georges Arnaud (1950)

Criterion #36, The Wages of Fear.

Two trucks leave a made-up town somewhere in South America. Each is carrying a load of nitroglycerin that will explode if jostled. Each truck has two drivers. One pair of drivers has been established as more protagonist-y than the other. This is a gritty adventure movie from 1953. What happens?

1.
a) Both trucks eventually explode.
b) Neither truck explodes.
c) One truck explodes almost immediately.
d) One truck explodes near the end.
e) None of the above.

2.
a) All four men eventually die.
b) All four men live.
c) Only one man dies.
d) Only one man survives.
e) None of the above.

3. Under the constant threat of sudden death…
a) …the men devolve into petty, bestial conflicts with one another.
b) …the men find a camaraderie that allows them to transcend their differences.
c) …one man loses his mind, one becomes vicious, one becomes stoic, and one becomes heroic.
d) …nothing changes, because all men everywhere are under the constant threat of sudden death.
e) None of the above.

(This is a tough quiz, right?)

The point is, you really don’t know. The old narrative-necessity objection — that it’s not really suspenseful when James Bond is being held at gunpoint because the hero can’t get killed — doesn’t apply here. By the time the trucks set out, half the movie has already gone by, and it has become very clear that this is not a standard-practice action movie in pacing or attitude. A sense of cynicism pervades. And so even the most outrageous possibility — that both trucks will blow up right away and everyone will die — is feasible.

I think this must be why people love this movie. Because it’s that rare suspense movie that actually feels dangerous. At least for a little while, it holds a genuine threat over the audience’s heads, with no narrative or philosophical safety net. Yeah, maybe everything really will go terribly wrong. Maybe it does!

I’m not sure how charming I find that, though. Given its very high repute, I was surprised to find the movie as unwelcoming as it is. Sure, I got caught up in the rhythm of “uh-oh!” “uh-oh!” “uh-oh!” that it sets in motion, but was I really having fun?

This is stupid but I’m allowed: I thought several times of Jaws, because the movies have certain formal similarities. (Both are split down the middle into two halves, the first half taking place in and around a community and the second half on a manly expedition away from the community; the second half in both movies is focused on very mechanically-inclined action, i.e. the kind that plays out through a lot of logistical close-ups that clarify where a rope is tied, what’s moving in which direction, what’s pushing against what, etc. And this mechanical action functions as the “work” around which we get a study of the varieties of manhood and manliness.) This silly comparison really accentuated for me how ostentatiously grueling this movie was. The first half of Jaws gets us to enjoy the place we’re spending our time, despite the horror; the first half of The Wages of Fear just wants us to feel how slow, sweaty, and demoralizing it is to be there. The second half of Jaws sets the physical suspense to lively music and makes it implicitly joyful; the second half of The Wages of Fear just wants to use it to scrape our nerves.

I can recognize that this is very effective and influential mechanical action. Duel couldn’t exist without this, nor could Speed, nor could any number of movie sequences where the rope is tied to the thing and uh-oh. And I can always enjoy that — a child watches first and foremost for kinetics, after all, and Roadrunner cartoons remain near the core of what movies are made of. But ultimately I prefer my action more dancelike, more amusing, more Douglas Fairbanks. More gay. Why else make action? This was so clenched and testosteronal. After a certain amount of backstabbing, broken bottle fighting, woman-hating, and friend-killing, I could have sworn the message of the movie was “men are the worst!” but I fear that it’s actually “men are men, men are hard, life is hard, everything is the worst.” I don’t agree with that and I don’t need it. It’s one thing to flirt with it for kicks like Humphrey Bogart but then turn around and wink. It’s another thing to rub it in like a sweaty, angry, nihilist challenge.

Here, though, Humphrey Bogart is played by Yves Montand of all people, which seems like it would be the epitome of faux-manliness. And Clouzot himself wasn’t a war hero or anything, he was an aesthete who had spent four years in a sanitarium. But it doesn’t matter; the real ethos of the film is grim and violent. It’s not a game. (And Jean Gabin turned down one of the roles because the character was too cowardly! In this crowd, you gotta keep it manly.)

Of course — not to spoil anything — the ending, and the seemingly extraneous presence of Vera Clouzot as the pretty, hapless female, could suggest a different message: “These men are anti-heroes. Their testosteronal attitude is all wrong. They should have seen the beauty in the world, been kind to women and to each other.” But the action makes that hard to buy. Action is action! A rope tied to a truck is unambiguous. We live through it with these guys. When it goes well for them we are relieved; when it goes badly we are pained. The guy commenting on Diabolique talked about how the audience is gotten firmly “on side” to sympathize with the murderesses; it’s not real morality that matters so much as movie morality. This movie tries to be even more cynical than to play by those rules. Here, the first half is spent making sure we’re not too far on anyone’s side. Then suddenly the second half is spent contending with THREATENING ACTION that cannot be watched without sympathy. Then we wrap it all up with a bow of dismissal. The upshot is I didn’t know what to care about.

The movie absolutely has atmosphere though. Portraying oppressive heat on screen is always a challenge. I was impressed by the opening here, which does it very effectively without gimmickry. The first half is probably too long and static but it is undeniably strong scene-setting; it’s like every Hollywood “exotic hellhole full of expatriates” movie, except this time genuinely grim and despairing, and with a tad of sardonic anti-Americanism, something you didn’t get a lot of out of Hollywood in those days. Again, it’s a Humphrey Bogart movie, but in a world where everything is awful.

I’d probably watch it again if it were on TV. Now that I know what happens, I can just siphon off the atmosphere.

There’s no menu screen above because again I saw it on Blu-Ray, and they make it impossible to capture the menus off Blu-Rays. And by some fluke dvdbeaver fails to pick up the slack on this one. The menu screen looked like a menu screen. (I know it would probably be more interesting and make for a prettier layout for these Criterion entries if I put the cover art up there instead of the menu screens. But this is what I’ve been doing, so this is what I’m doing.)

Bonus features blah blah blah, fine.

Music is by Georges Auric again. Again, Clouzot’s not much for music; we basically have a main title and then a few bits of source music that may not be by Auric. This album reports that he did indeed arrange the final cue, but it’s not original. The main title is his only real compositional contribution. It’s good — a percussion landscape like hot sun and desperation. The middle section seems to confuse South America with Spain but no matter. Track 36.