The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot) (Patreon)

81/100

Third viewing, last seen 2008. A couple of years later, I wrote a Scenic Routes column that, while specifically addressing our heroes' efforts to blow up a giant boulder blocking the road, does a fairly thorough job of anatomizing the movie's sweat-dotted suspense in general. And I really could have chosen to tackle any one of Wages' four major setpieces, each of which boasts a distinct heart-in-your-mouth flavor. Seems like it'd be rather dull to watch drivers be exceedingly cautious for an entire movie, yet Clouzot (closely following Georges Arnaud's source novel in its particulars, I assume) keeps finding novel ways to make slow-moving trucks no less thrilling than Speed's bus plowing through city traffic—and in fact there's even a proto-Speed situation along the washboarded stretch of road, with one truck unable to slow down or KABOOM! while steadily gaining upon the other truck, which is paradoxically unable to speed up or KABOOM!  Even during ostensibly humdrum moments, Clouzot expertly exploits our omnipresent awareness that something could unexpectedly go explosively awry at any moment, though he then (bit of a SPOILER here) somewhat perversely opts not to show why Bimba and Luigi's truck detonates, or even to offer a plausible hypothesis after the fact. We never learn what happened, and Jo points out that the two men themselves very likely died unaware (that they died, even), which is some serious existential grimness. Basically an unassailable film from the journey's start right up to its finish, though I could live without the sledgehammer symbolism of Jo's childhood tabac and the fence beyond which there was simply nothing (despite that being the nothing in which I believe). 

Some folks do assail Wages' lengthy and languid scene-setting preamble, in which 40 minutes elapse before nitroglycerin is so much as mentioned. (It's a full hour before the trucks finally head out.) Could’ve been a little tighter, perhaps, and I wouldn't have strongly objected, in the script stage, to ditching Mario's sort-of-girlfriend, Linda, whose presence provides little more* than an opportunity for Mario to indulge in some light misogyny that feels extrinsic to everything else. But the driving sequences are so effective in large part because of the care that Clouzot takes in first establishing the four men's distinct personalities, as well as the dire straits that made them willing to accept such a potentially suicidal gig. As I briefly note in the Scenic Routes piece, Jo's terror is heightened by the fearlessness he'd shown earlier, handing Luigi a loaded pistol and then slapping him in the face, daring him to shoot; when your movie's antagonist is just some containers of liquid, it's enormously helpful to establish badasses for whom that liquid represents an anxiety they've never known (plus one coward who gets a chance to be foolishly courageous). No, what's always bugged me about this classic is not its long prelude, but its short postscript, which is just way too cutely ironic for my taste (especially as intercut with Linda's raucous celebration of Mario's survival back in Deadendvilla). I think it's the choice of road, honestly—Mario's unburdened swerving is just so blatantly dangerous that his fate comes across as manufactured rather than organic. Maybe if he'd done it on a flat straightaway and accidentally lost control, veering into oncoming lanes, or something like that. As is, it's too much, and I find myself wishing that the film had ended with the striking shot of Mario, still black with oil, stumbling toward a huge fire burning in the middle distance. 

* Well, it also provides a role for Véra Clouzot, who gave only three screen performances, all of them for her husband, before dying young of a heart attack. So even though I don't have much use for the character she plays in Wages of Fear, there's a part of me that's grateful for the opportunity to see her again.