The Wages of Fear (French: Le Salaire de la peur) is a 1953 French thriller film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, starring Yves Montand, and based on a 1950 novel by Georges Arnaud. When a South American oil well owned by an American company catches fire, the company hires four European men, down on their luck, to drive two trucks over mountain dirt roads, carrying the nitroglycerine needed to extinguish the fire. Violent Road (aka Hell's Highway), directed by Howard W. Koch in 1958, and Sorcerer, directed by William Friedkin in 1977, are American remakes. With this, Clouzot reached international fame, and was able to direct Les Diaboliques.

For about forty minutes of this film, I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into. Nothing was really going on, the characters were ambling about, talking in circles, and there was no semblance of a plot developing. Despite my best intentions (and everything I've learned about cinema), I lost interest.

However, once the oil well disaster occurs, sparking the plot, I was hooked. It's such a contrived and nonsensical story (was there really such an urgent need for the nitroglycerin that the oil company was willing to risk it all blowing up?) but it's pulled off so expertly and thrillingly that the film thrives because of it, not in spite of it. Every trivial problem is life-threatening, every moment is potentially deadly, each normally banal act becomes increasingly important and serious. The sense of doom developed is palpable, and it's entirely because of the plot.

Coupled with that sense of doom is a terrific atmosphere of fatalism. It lingers just under the surface throughout the film, finally bursting forward when the first truck explodes and Jo becomes injured in the bog. That great final conversation between him and Mario, in which he expresses his desire to survive, despite taking the high-risk, low-reward job, is a perfect summation of the film's themes; Mario's subsequent collapse in front of the exploding oil well is one of the great shots in all of cinema (reminding me strongly of There Will Be Blood) and superbly symbolizes the dread and desperation that he has undergone. That final twist is just icing on the cake.

That first act hurts it, but this is a nearly perfect thriller.