This movie just keeps thrilling. Deservedly famed for its suspense, Wages of Fear doesn't draw on sudden surprises and camera cheats. Instead, its bleak, existential world wrings out of us all hope of anything good happening to the characters, and we expect its world of material determinism to ultimately punish the quartet of risk-takers at the center of the film. After the happy achievement of the men blowing up a boulder that had blocked the road, a rock that was dislodged by the explosion tumbles down the hill toward a jerry can filled with nitro. Given the world of the film, we don’t really know whether or not the rock will hit the can and destroy the men and their trucks. In this case, it doesn't, but later in the film, a happy achievement will be quickly followed by a devastating one. Because the world of Wages of Fear is so bleak, we watch it in continuing expectation of something bad happening.
Many elements of Wages of Fear create this world, but the oft-criticized, but its long set-up is one of the most important. Love, friendship, fairness, honesty, and decency have a place in this world as a group of expats jockey with each other for advantage. In the opening of the film, we see kids playing with roaches whose legs are tied together, a bleak symbol of the world here (and one Peckinpah references at the opening of The Wild Bunch). We soon see Mario mistreating Linda and pragmatically shifting his friendship from Luigi to Jo. Meanwhile, Linda’s boss uses her sexually, and flaunts it to Mario, while she sees her situation as part of the deal. The unscrupulous O’Brien won’t help his former friend Jo and recruits expats for the suicide job of transporting the nitro because they're so readily expendable. The situation is so bleak that the despairing Italian kid hangs himself…at a shrine to the Virgin. Introduced to a world like this, we don’t expect happy things to occur when the men finally take to the road, so we watch, expecting the worst at any moment.
The existential emptiness here becomes more obvious later. Age, in the character of Jo, has neither wisdom nor respect. Despite all his tough guy posturing early in the film, Jo is stricken sick with fear as they start transporting the nitro and is later beaten by the younger Mario, who explicitly says physical strength shouldn't be a determiner but is. Injured and reminiscing about a high fence he’d never looked behind as a kid, Jo dies saying “there’s nothing there,” a somewhat on-the-nose summary of the film's philosophy. And after we get to know the amiable Luigi and Bimba, Clouzot kills them in an explosion we don’t even see. A flash of light interrupts the conversation of Jo and Mario, and we hear an explosion. Clouzot then cuts to a column of smoke in the distance. There’s no drama or heroic struggle when we lose that truck; instead, the two men just vanish without meaning or significance.
The bleakness, which creates so much of the suspense of the film, is not without its moments of beauty. At one point, Clouzot’s camera captures a family of rainforest Indians watching the oil well burn, and there’s memorable beauty in the oil-filled crater left by the truck explosion; the rhythmical pumping of oil from the pipeline is like a heartbeat as gushes of black oil slowly fill the crater. It’s the ruptured artery of the film’s dark world. And there’s a strong, graphic shot of Mario looking at the lattice of beams holding up the turn-around platform on a curve of the road. The beams cast an imprisoning shadow over Mario as he walks around outside the platform. With the help of cinematographer Armand Thirard, Clouzot manages to find dark beauty in Wages of Fear.
This film is a bleak thriller that gets no small part of its life from its pessimistic worldview. Hitchcock may thrill with bravura, panache and psychology, but as Wages of Fear shows, Clouzot can thrill with philosophy.
