Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13424 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-01-21
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 147 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
In 1953, before any American studio exec used the phrase "high concept", Henri-George Clouzot's The Wages of Fear boasted a premise so literally explosive that audiences were excited before they got into the theatres. With an oil-fire burning out of control deep in the South American jungle, two lorryloads of highly unstable nitro-glycerin have to be driven through miles of unstable terrain littered with dangerous turns, crumbling planks, falling rocks and mediocre hardtop. One good jolt will vaporise truck, nitro, drivers and a substantial swathe of the countryside, so the company recruits desperate souls among the loser tramps who loiter around the nowhere town of Las Piedras, begging for any kind of work.

On the road, Clouzot stages a string of unforgettable sequences: one stretch of badly paved track can only be crossed by driving at under six miles an hour or over 40; a mountain turn requires that the trucks back out onto a rickety, rotten wooden structure; a 50-ton boulder has fallen into the road, and one of the drivers calmly drains a litre of nitro into his thermos to blow it up, only remembering when the fuse is lit that this will rain pebbles all over the countryside and a few good hits on the cargo will set it off. This is perhaps as great a mix of action-adventure and contest as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and still a textbook example of sustained suspense.

On the DVD: The print is in great shape, though the image is a little soft; the menu has a clever explosive aspect and uses the same vintage artwork as the sleeve cannily combined with a snippet. There are trailers for both Wages and Clozuot's other masterpiece, Les Diaboliques, as well as biographies of the principal cast, eight stills and three posters.--Kim Newman

DVD Description
DVD Special Features:

Original Theatrical Trailer
Les Diaboliques Original Trailer
Stills Gallery
Poster Gallery
Cast and Crew Biographies

English subtitles

Synopsis
Made two years before his slightly better known DIABOLIQUE, Clouzot's nail-biter of a suspense film is the story of four broke and desperate men stranded in Latin America. Eager for a way out of their respective situations, they accept an American oil company's impossibly dangerous offer to transport two truckloads of nitroglycerin across hazardous jungle terrain. Remade by William Friedkin as SORCERER in 1977.

Customer Reviews

One of the greatest thrillers ever - but only the Criterion 2-disc set is worth buying!
We can thank the Movie Gods that Jean Gabin didn't want to play a coward or else we'd never have had Charles Vanel's superb performance in Clouzot's The Wages of Fear: it's notable that Friedkin's intriguingly feverish but suspense-free remake didn't even attempt to give its equivalent deadbeat killer a similar arc, despite the fact that the character and his curious shifting relationship with Yves Montand cuts to the very core of the story's take on the nature of courage, bravado and machismo. At the beginning of the film Vanel is the tough guy who can walk the walk, while Montand is his puppy doggish sidekick, throwing over his best friend for his new crush until his feet of clay are revealed when the chips are down. Even in a place where, in the absence of white women the white men cling to each other, this relationship seems to go a few steps beyond mere hero-worship, but when they hit the road the power in the relationship shifts, and in the process we get to watch Yves Montand become a genuine movie star before our very eyes, which is almost as exciting as the road trip to Hell with a truckload of unstable nitro and miles of very, very bumpy roads. Almost, because I doubt there's anything to beat the film's extraordinary double-jeopardy sequence on a rotting platform on a mountain road - a scene pretty much done for real - which takes your breath away until you suddenly realize that the second truck is going to have to do the same thing in even worse conditions... I remember when I saw that at a revival house a couple of years ago I genuinely forgot to breathe during that sequence, and found myself doing the same even on DVD.

Criterion's recent 2-disc DVD is a great improvement on their previous single-disc version in terms of picture quality and extras, but sadly, the `new and improved' subtitle translation is just as politically correct as the old one, dropping most of the obscenities and all of the racist language that's an important part of the hatred and self-loathing that drives the characters to risk everything for a chance for a ticket out of this backwater South American hellhole (amazingly recreated in the Carmargue in France because Montand refused to film in Fascist Spain). The shoot may have been jinxed by delays, accidents and colossal budget overruns, but damn, it was worth it.

A word of warning - aside from Criterion's recent 2-disc NTSC version, the UK PAL versions of the film are all very poor quality (especially Optimum's poor UK standards conversion copy) and are to be avoided.

Great surpise!
Through Amazon's excellent rental scheme, I'm trying to educate myself by watching films I haven't seen before in genres I wouldn't normally watch. Although I love much modern French cinema, perhaps I'm showing my ignorance and youth by saying I hadn't heard of Wages of Fear.
Great film, though! It is pretty long, and if it were directed today so much of it would have been cut. But it's the opening twenty minutes or so under the beating South American heat which really set the tone for this claustrophobic thriller. The action scenes are fantastic, there are more set-pieces than you can shake a cinematic stick at and there are some great characterisations by a fine acting ensemble. Yves Montand is, of course, excellent in the lead.
I didn't actually fancy watching this when it came down to watching it (footie and phone calls seemed a priority) But as soon as it started I was hooked. A fantastic suprise.

Timeless suspense
Fifty years on and none of the suspense has wayned from this timeless classic. Well worth struggling with the French dialogue (subtitled in English) on the Optimum Releasing version. Those with multi region DVD players would do well to track down the Criterion Home Video version with dubbed English and extra scenes and features not seen since pre-prohibition times. If this has given you a taste for the genius of Henri-Georges Clouzot you may well like Diabloique. More psycho that Psycho!!. But pales into insignificance angainst the mastery contained in The Wages of Fear.