The Wages of Fear
| The Wages of Fear | |
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original film poster
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| Directed by | Henri-Georges Clouzot |
| Produced by | Raymond Borderie |
| Screenplay by | Henri-Georges Clouzot Jérome Geronimi |
| Based on |
Le salaire de la peur by Georges Arnaud |
| Starring |
Yves Montand Charles Vanel Folco Lulli Peter Van Eyck |
| Music by | Georges Auric |
| Cinematography | Armand Thirard |
| Edited by | Madeleine Gug Etiennette Muse Henri Rust |
| Distributed by |
Distributors Corporation of America (US) Criterion Collection (1999 DVD release) |
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Release date
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Running time
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148 minutes |
| Country | France Italy |
| Language | French, Spanish, English, German, Italian, Russian |
The Wages of Fear (French: Le salaire de la peur) is a 1953 French-Italian drama film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, starring Yves Montand, and based on the 1950 French novel Le salaire de la peur (lit. "The Salary of Fear") by Georges Arnaud. When an 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, loaded with nitroglycerine needed to extinguish the flames. The film brought Clouzot international fame, and allowed him to direct Les Diaboliques. In France the film was the 4th highest-grossing film of the year with a total of 6,944,306 admissions.
Frenchmen Mario and Jo, German Bimba and Italian Luigi are stuck in the isolated town of Las Piedras. Surrounded by desert, the town is linked to the outside world only by a small airport, but the airfare is beyond the means of the men. There is little opportunity for employment aside from the American corporation that dominates the town, Southern Oil Company (SOC), which operates the nearby oil fields and owns a walled compound within the town. SOC is suspected of unethical practices such as exploiting local workers and taking the law into its own hands, but the townspeople's dependence upon it is such that they suffer in silence.
Mario is a sarcastic Corsican playboy, who treats his devoted lover, Linda, with disdain. Jo is an aging ex-gangster who just recently found himself stranded in the town. Bimba is an intense, quiet individual whose father was murdered by the Nazis, and who himself worked for three years in a salt mine. Luigi, Mario's roommate, is a jovial, hardworking individual, who has just learned that he is dying from cement dust in his lungs. Mario befriends Jo due to their common background of having lived in Paris, but a rift develops between Jo and the other cantina regulars because of his combative, arrogant personality.
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Wikipedia