Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953): Criterion Blu-ray review

Whatever alchemy is at work, some movies draw you in forcefully no matter how familiar they have become through multiple viewings. Watching Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) yet again – occasioned by Criterion’s new 4K release – I was once more gripped from the opening shots and held for 153 minutes by Clouzot’s narrative skill. This despite the film being, on the surface, a simple story – four desperate men stuck in a dead-end South American town take the job of driving two trucks carrying nitroglycerine over treacherous roads to an oil well fire – and yet Clouzot’s precision in presenting every moment of their dangerous journey in finely-etched visceral detail makes the film seem fresh on each new viewing.

This is a bleak film, devoid of sentimentality, in which the characters are quite unlikable, and yet through their ordeal they gradually gain audience empathy. Stress, fear, moral failures and questionable decisions reflect the existential challenges we all face, though here amplified and thrown into stark relief by the extreme circumstances confronting the characters. We learn virtually nothing about the origins of these men or what brought them to Las Piedras, a purgatory from which there seems to be no escape – if they had money, they wouldn’t be here, but there’s no way to make money … that is until the explosion at an oil well on the other side of the mountains opens a door.

As many have pointed out, this opening section is reminiscent of John Huston’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), with its lost souls living in squalor, embarking on a quixotic journey which promises sufficient riches to escape back into the world they came from. While in Huston’s film they are doomed by their own destructive flaws, Clouzot adds a heavy layer of physical danger to those character flaws, the stress of imminent death amplifying the men’s weaknesses. The bleakness of the film lies in its pitiless depiction of those weaknesses; in Sierra Madre, Fred C. Dobbs is pathologized, his desperation deteriorating into homicidal paranoia, but in The Wages of Fear, the four men’s behaviour is situational, a moment-by-moment response to the danger and a desperate desire to survive. This is why it becomes possible to empathize with them despite the things they do.

All of this is familiar, but on this viewing I watched from a slightly different perspective. I knew that the film had been heavily cut for its U.S. release in 1955 – and no doubt the first few times I saw it, it was this truncated version – but it had been mostly restored by 1991. I had always assumed that these cuts were largely made by the distributor to reduce the running time and I hadn’t looked into it very much. Yes, there was also the unflattering picture of the American oil company which had no doubt been viewed as offensive and needed to be mitigated, but apparently there was a whole other element which had proved unacceptable to mid-’50s American sensibilities and I feel a little foolish for not having seen it before.

This, like so many movies centred on male characters under stress – war films, gangster films, westerns – presents a group of men within which those stresses produce various degrees of both friction and bonding; there’s little room in these microcosms for relationships with women, other than as objectified figures to be used temporarily and discarded. This emphasis on masculinity has been a core element of the movies since their inception, so common and familiar that I confess there are times I simply take it for granted – particularly in a movie like The Wages of Fear, which is so concerned with men struggling to maintain and assert their sense of masculine identity. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me to read these relationships as coded with homosexuality.

And yet, this was one of the major concerns behind the cuts made for U.S. distribution. And apparently the cuts weren’t sufficient to excise the problem completely: in mentioning the dynamics of the protagonists’ relationships, Bosley Crowther in his New York Times review comments that “What lies in this cryptic liaison is never clarified. It smacks of some noisome perversion…” Does the film actually imply a sexual element in these men’s relationships, and if it does what does that actually signify?

In the film’s first hour we are introduced to a group of ex-pats wasting away in Las Piedras, men from France, Germany, Italy and the States. They hang out at a bar, scrounge cigarettes and drinks, get on the proprietor’s nerves … but even as they annoy each other, they stick together as a group in their shared desperation. Mario (Yves Montand) emerges as the protagonist, fawned over by the film’s only female character, the bar’s servant girl Linda (Vera Clouzot), whom he treats with condescension – she declares her love for him, but he’s more concerned with her stealing cigarettes for him from her boss. He shows little concern about her being sexually abused by the boss and chooses the company of other men when she dresses up to go out with him.

Mario shares quarters with Luigi (Folco Lulli), who has a construction job and provides meals; the film’s most stereotyped character, a comic opera Italian, Luigi hints at a domestic situation which certainly plays into the suggestion of something more than mere friendship or convenience – when Mario returns to their hovel, Luigi is kneading bread dough as he prepares a meal and they end up bickering, with Mario eventually stalking out angrily; they’re a couple getting on each other’s nerves.

Then a new figure arrives by plane, a man in an immaculate white suit, exuding an air of authority and perhaps wealth – although his arrival here casts doubt on the latter. Monsieur Jo (Charles Vanel), simply by his assured manner, gets instant respect from everyone he meets. Mario is drawn to him, partly because M. Jo is also French and they both know the same area of Paris, and partly because Mario senses a possibility of benefit in attaching himself to the newcomer.

Within the larger narrative of the dangerous journey, the film is actually more concerned with Mario’s relationship with M. Jo. He quickly attaches himself to the older man, offering advice about life in the town, doing favours, trotting along beside him like an eager puppy – a pointed echo of Linda’s fawning attention to Mario. This shifting allegiance sets Mario against the other men in the group, leading to confrontations in the bar which climax with the public humiliation of Luigi in which Mario seems to take real pleasure, cementing his attachment to M. Jo as the new alpha male in town.

Although M. Jo is rejected during the trials to find drivers capable of getting the two trucks over the mountain (he has a history with the company which compounds the issue of his age), when one of the four doesn’t show up for departure – the suggestion is that M. Jo has gotten rid of the man (something made explicit in Sorcerer [1977], William Friedkin’s version of the story) – the company boss is forced to take him on and he becomes Mario’s co-driver. For the first stretch of the journey, Mario defers to the older man and they share reminiscences of Paris; but it isn’t long before it becomes clear that for all his bravado, M. Jo’s nerves are shot. His timidity puts them both at risk and Mario’s respect crumbles quickly as he’s forced to take responsibility for their mutual survival.

Once exposed, M. Jo sinks into abject cowardice, but Mario refuses to let him run away; he uses the threat of violence to assert his dominance, just as M. Jo had done back in the relative safety of the town. Once the dynamic between the two men has reversed polarities, Mario becomes hardened emotionally – perhaps partially in reaction to his own previous subservience – leading to the film’s grimmest sequence. Faced with a crater in the road which is quickly filling with crude oil from a ruptured pipe, Mario forces M. Jo to wade ahead and guide him. With the ground beneath the pool uncertain and made slick by the oil, he can’t afford to stop so when M. Jo gets caught up on a submerged branch, he keeps driving, the truck’s wheel crushing Jo’s leg. Ironically, having refused to stop despite the older man’s cries, the truck gets stuck anyway.

More ironically, as M. Jo lies in pain at the edge of the pool, it’s he who offers a solution after Mario has given up. He tells Mario how to rig some cables to essentially winch the truck out of the pool. Once on their way again, their relationship shifts into its final phase. M. Jo is now helpless, in pain, slipping into delirium. He lies across the truck’s seat, his crushed leg propped against the window, his head resting on Mario’s shoulder. Mario’s contempt for his cowardice has faded, perhaps ameliorated by guilt for having driven the truck over his partner, an act motivated not simply by his determination not to get stuck in the sink hole, but also by a malicious desire to punish the man to whom he had previously submitted so obsequiously.

To distract M. Jo from his pain, Mario prompts him to remember Paris, describing the streets they had both walked in better times. Jo’s helplessness has put Mario in the position of offering comfort as a parent might to a child who is hurt, and the final stage of the journey is marked by a tenderness shaped by Mario’s own sense of helplessness. There is nothing he can do to fix the damage he has caused and he suffers as M. Jo slips inevitably into oblivion.

Is the trajectory of this relationship informed by any element of sexuality, or is it rather simply the behaviour of two men reduced to a base animal existence testing one another for relative dominance? To read it as the former suggests an uneasiness in the viewer about the implications of a close emotional and psychological connection between two men, or perhaps a belief that power itself is inevitably infused with a sexual charge. These implications are read into the film rather than unquestionably embedded there by Clouzot. That the U.S. distributor felt the need to cut out so much material open to this interpretation perhaps says more about the social and political climate of the States in the mid-’50s, where paranoia about communism and sexuality (or, as Crowther put it in the Times, “some noisome perversion”) caused anxiety about whether these men might be doing something unacceptable off-screen.

Anxiety about communism presents a clearer case for cutting out material dealing with the oil company. The arrogance and condescension of the man in charge, Bill O’Brien (William Tubbs), and his management team reveals the colonialist attitudes of American capital, which sees other parts of the world merely as raw materials to be exploited. This attitude also takes in the inhabitants of the places where they operate, bluntly apparent in their lack of concern about the dead and injured workers after the well explosion. Hearing that a safety inspector is on his way to the site, O’Brien tells his foreman to blame the explosion on the dead employees. When one of the team balks at the idea of hiring “bums” from the town to drive the trucks, O’Brien points out that using outsiders avoids issues with the union and since he doesn’t expect any of them to survive the journey, it probably won’t cost them anything. The company ethos at every turn is profits over lives, and the film makes no bones about this being a bad thing, but Hollywood wasn’t interested in being critical of capitalism in the midst of the Cold War against communism.

*

The disk

The Criterion release – available in a dual-format 4K UHD/Blu-ray edition or as a stand-alone Blu-ray – uses the same 2017 4K transfer from TF1 Studio and La Cinémathèque française seen in an earlier BFI release. The image is gorgeous, with a great deal of detail, excellent contrast and a rich range of grays, all supporting a nicely textured film-like appearance with authentic grain. The restored audio is also strong, with clear dialogue and sound effects which add to the film’s visceral impact.

The supplements

Most of the supplements have been carried over from Criterion’s previous editions, including interviews with assistant director Michel Romanoff (22:26) and Clouzot biographer Marc Godin (10:09) from 2005, and an archival clip with Montand talking about working with Clouzot (1988, 5:00). There’s a documentary about Clouzot’s career from 2004 (52:33) and a featurette about the American censorship of the film (2005, 12:12). Finally there’s a featurette about the restoration (2017, 8:06) and a pair of trailers – the original (2:53) and one for the restoration (1:39).

The booklet reprints Dennis Lehane’s essay from 2005 and an account of the production using clips from numerous interviews which was first included in a French book about Clouzot published in 2002.