The Wages of Fear (1953)

Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur) is about a group of foreigners living in a South American town. They are all pretty miserable there, but have no way of going home. The first half of the film shows how miserable they are. There is an oil company, Southern Oil Company (SOC), in the country. About 300 miles from where the story begins, a fire breaks out at one of the oil fields and they have no way of stopping the fire without nitroglycerin. The SOC headquarters has nitroglycerin, but has no way of safely getting it to the oil fields. Because they do not want to danger their union workers, they accept volunteers to deliver the nitroglycerin, which will be transported in oil cans. The job will pay $2,000 a person and four people are needed to deliver the two trucks. The rest of the film deals with their voyage across the poorly-maintained roads. This is reasonably dramatic as nitroglycerin is highly explosive and will detonate spontaneously if disturbed. While the majority of the film was indeed dramatic, I wasn't overly impressed.

Of the actors in this film, the only one familiar to me was Véra Clouzot who had a supporting role in the film. She is the real-life wife of the director and starred in another of his films, Les diaboliques. The acting in here was fine as the actors did indeed come off as nervous and scared as their journey went on.

As the film wore on, I thought it got rather dull. The difficulties encountered by the protagonists became more and more complex and I found their solutions more and more unrealistic. I also found the ending rather stupid and feel the film should have ended a few minutes earlier when the main story was completed. While Henri-Georges Clouzot's film Les diaboliques is one of the best films I have ever seen, this film is not. It certainly has some dramatic moments and good special effects for 1953, but it is far less entertaining than Les diaboliques.

70/100
C-