When I was watching the masterpiece The Wages of Fear (1953), from director Henri-Georges Clouzot, last night, the famous quote from director Howard Hawks came to mind: "A great movie is four great scenes and no bad ones."
Of course, that's not actually what Hawks said. The bar was actually lower for Hawks, who only required three great scenes.
Because I didn't remember that in the moment, I thought it was a particularly apt description for The Wages of Fear, which contains four terrific major set pieces on the 300-mile journey to deliver nitroglycerin by truck over uneven and unpredictable roads. And because it has no bad scenes, well, it's a great film indeed.
If you don't know the story, it involves four men (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck and Folco Lulli) who are selected from a pool of applicants for a job they know may be their last. They're in a dead-end South American town with no money or means of moving on, but an opportunity arises when the SOC (Southern Oil Company) needs to truck the nitroglycerin to the site of one of its wells, which is a raging inferno that has already taken a dozen lives. The nitroglycerin is design to help blow out the inferno -- like a candle, one character says -- but first they have to get it there, and any sort of hard contact or even too vigorous bouncing on the road will blow the whole truck sky high. Fortunately, they've got two, meant to be spaced 30 minutes apart from each other, though that doesn't exactly work out as planned. The job would pay them $2,000 apiece, a fortune in 1953 and for these men in particular.
(Just so I don't forget, Montand's character is named Mario, and Lulli's character is named Luigi. I have to think that was a coincidence and not the basis for Nintendo's flagship product, but it was funny to note it, especially just days after seeing The Super Mario Bros. Movie. A few others on the internet have commented on this but it does indeed appear to be a coincidence.)
The harrowing journey itself would obviously be enough to sustain an entire feature, but Clouzot starts us off with a good 45 minutes in this town, which establishes the personality of the characters as well as the hopelessness of their situation. Both times I've watched the film, I've wondered if we needed that much in the town -- and both times I've decided we do. It contributes to the epic scope of the film, and since we're going to spend so much time with these characters, it's useful to see them outside of the context of their suicide mission. As a point of contrast, William Friedkin's 1977 remake Sorcerer clocks in a half-hour shorter, at two as opposed to two-and-a-half hours. Some of the plot details are changed -- if memory serves, that movie involves more political intrigue -- but the long opening section is also lost, just one of the reasons that one doesn't hold a candle, so to speak, to this one.
Once we do get on the road, it's just one moment of clenched teeth after the other. You know, because of the length of the film, that at least one of the trucks will survive certainly the first, but very likely the second and also the third pickle they find themselves in. That does not decrease the tension one iota. And because there are two trucks, you really don't know when one of them will go kablooey -- but almost certainly that one of them will.
I don't want to tell you too much about the obstacles these four men encounter along the way, because if you haven't seen the movie, you need to correct that straight away. But I do want to tell you something about them, and I might as well tell you about the first one -- don't worry, even knowing that both trucks make it through, you'll still feel stressed as hell watching the scene. It involves a stretch of road called "the washboard," whose regular bumps will certainly be enough to detonate the nitroglycerin -- unless you go really fast or really slow. The fact that the two trucks each choose one of these methods of bypassing this area -- remember, there were no CB radios for them to talk to each other -- is all you need to know to grok just how disastrous the scenario has the potential to be.
Outside of the four distinct impossible scenarios these trucks face, each of which is more anxiety producing than the last, the dynamics between the characters are just as easy to savor. We spend a lot more time with Montand and Vanel, both Frenchmen, whose bond takes an unexpected turn when one of the pair reveals himself to be a coward, in direct opposition to his previous bluster. The fact that they have this bond makes the situation all the more complicated -- one man would like nothing more than to ditch the other, except that he needs him, and the other would almost rather wander off and die of heat exposure in the wilds than keep waiting for it all to just end in a flash. The relationship is fascinating, demonstrating a complicated form of love between the men.
We don't spend as much time with either the Dutchman (Bimba) or the Italian (Luigi), but we do get snippets of their downtime conversations and life philosophies. All four are fully drawn characters with their strengths and weaknesses, all of which will be on display over the course of the film.
Their solutions to their issues are equal parts ingenious and nuts. This sort of task means being on a knife's edge between survival and calamity, and the ways they do or don't rise to the occasion are always fascinating.
And there's a gut punch. I won't tell you about the gut punch. But it's a good one, an unexpected one.
I watched The Wages of Fear at end of the day on a holiday (ANZAC Day) after too many late nights in a row. I did consider whether being able to get through a two-hour and 28-minute black and white movie, mostly in French or Spanish, was in the cards in this scenario.
Well, as great movies always do, The Wages of Fear kept me wide awake, straight to the end, wondering what would happen -- even if I already knew.
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