Le Salaire de la peur 1953

Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) is Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 thriller in which four broke European men, stranded in a dusty South American oil town, accept a suicidal job: driving two lorries loaded with nitroglycerine across 300 miles of bad road to an oil well that is on fire. The slightest jolt can blow them up. The first hour is a slow, sweaty portrait of the town and its drifters; the rest is pure suspense, one obstacle after another. It won both the Golden Bear in Berlin and the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1953, a rare double, and it still holds up as one of the tensest films ever made.

Las Piedras

The town of Las Piedras is a dead end. There is no work and no way out without money for a plane ticket. Mario, a young Corsican played by Yves Montand, lounges about with his friend Luigi and a café waitress, Linda, who adores him. Then Jo arrives, an older Parisian gangster played by Charles Vanel, all swagger and stories, and Mario attaches himself to him.

When a well belonging to the American oil company SOC catches fire, the manager needs nitroglycerine to blow out the flames. There is no safe way to carry it there, and the company's unionised drivers would refuse. So it offers 2,000 dollars a head to four volunteers from the town. Mario and Jo are picked, with Luigi, who has just learned he is dying, and Bimba, a quiet German played by Peter van Eyck.

The road

From here the film becomes a sequence of trials. A stretch of corrugated road where the trucks must either crawl or go fast enough to skim over the bumps. A rotten wooden platform on a hairpin bend, where one truck has to reverse out over a drop. A boulder blocking the road that must be blasted with a little of the cargo. A pool of oil from a burst pipeline.

Clouzot films each one with an engineer's attention to cause and effect, so that we understand exactly what can go wrong. There is almost no music. The sound of engines, creaking wood and dripping oil does the work.

Fear changes people

The film is also a study of character under pressure. Jo, the big talker, turns out to be the one who breaks; Mario, who admired him, becomes cruel. Clouzot has no illusions about friendship or courage. Montand, until then known mostly as a singer, proved he was an actor. Vanel, a veteran of the silent era, received a special mention for his performance at Cannes.

What the Americans cut

The film's view of the oil company is openly critical: the company treats the men as expendable and pays them only because it is cheaper than doing the job safely. For its first release in the United States the film was shortened, and several scenes that made the company look bad were removed. The full version, at about two and a half hours, is the one to see.

Véra Clouzot, the director's wife, plays Linda. She returned two years later in his Les Diaboliques.

Remakes

William Friedkin remade it in 1977 as Sorcerer, which flopped and has since been reassessed. A French remake for Netflix appeared in 2024. Neither matches the original's patience or its cruelty.

This is one of the best films to show someone who thinks they do not like old black-and-white films. More choices in the best French films of the 1950s and the best French thrillers.