The Wages of Fear *****

In 1953, Alfred Hitchcock and I were having some beverages while sitting in an outdoor café at Cannes during the film festival that year. We’d just watched Lili and Come Back, Little Sheba and were both embarrassed to part of any community that would be responsible for such garbage (I was actually thrown out of Little Sheba for throwing my martini glass against the screen). Then, it happened – we saw Wages of Fear.

Both of us just sat there nursing Scotch in a daze. Wages was one of the most gripping thrillers I’d ever seen and it even had the "Master of Suspense" shaken. The basic concept was a huge American oil company needed to find a way to get several barrels of nitroglycerin over a rocky mountain pass. No union man would take the job, so the nod went to four down-and-out locals who saw this as their only change to get out of this hellish town.

The first hour was spent developing the characters (with two particularly memorable performances by the always great Charles Vanel and Yves Montand) and relating how horrible this town was. Basically the point that the great French director Henri-Georges Clouzot wants to establish is why four people would do what they are about to do. This material would make a reasonably entertaining movie by itself if he just cut 30 to 45 minutes out of it, but here it’s just the set up for the main event.

The final hour-and-a-half of the movie are spent in the truck as Clouzot tosses one dilemma after another at his four characters. One problem was that the truck has to cross an oil pit. A second issue occurred when the driver discovered if the truck drove under 40 miles-an-hour over one part of the terrain, the barrels shook too much. There were also a few extra sharp turns and one classic scene where the truck is caught on a rickety wooden platform while trying to cut a corner.

Once we both got some booze in us and were able to formulate complete sentences, I joked with Hitchcock that if he made the story, he would have had the drivers hit a big rock in the first fifteen minutes, blow up, find a new body under the rock and start the real murder mystery. After laughing for a minute about the convoluted plot that was typical of some of Hitch’s early movies, Alfred stopped laughing and took on a far-off gaze. I should have copyrighted my idea since it bears great similarity to the opening minutes of Psycho.

Anyway, Hitchcock was a great admirer of Clouzot for obvious reasons. Clouzot was a firm believer in Hitchcock’s theory of thriller movie-making. Hitchcock never wanted to scare anyone. He just wanted to drive you insane with suspense. He once said that it’s easy to scare someone; put a bomb under someone’s chair and set it off without the audience knowing its there. But suspense is an art. An example of suspense that Hitch always used was to take that same scene, except let the audience, but not the protagonist, know that bomb is there and make it a time bomb. Let the audience hear the ticking while the main character sits unaware. This is suspense and the longer you can stretch this out, the better a filmmaker you are. Clouzot was one of the best.

This movie was remade 25 years later by William Friedkin, a fine director in his own right. This newer version was called Sorcerer and it was a pretty good effort, but it lacked something. Friedkin had better technology at hand and this helped with some of the scenes, but the timing was just a little off. It wasn’t frantic enough. Friedkin couldn’t keep up Clouzot’s pace. Clouzot would move the camera in and out, back and forth and keep cutting the entire time. He would cut between a close-up and a long shot, jarring the audience through the bumps of the terrain. With the knowledge that one bump too many could send this truck off into a million pieces, each jarring edit added to the tension.

The best part was that today a thriller has to have a happy ending (Speed) – not back then. These four men were at Clouzot’s almost-sadistic whim as he played puppet-master with their lives. It just ratcheted up the tension even higher. After walking out of the theater, people were visibly shaken, some looking white as a summer cloud.

Two years later, Clouzot would make another classic, Diabolique, which had probably the greatest plot twist in the history of cinema. The beauty of the twist was how perfectly Clouzot set us all up. I believe this twist was the inspiration for the famous ending of Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Hitchcock and Clouzot are great directors and the difference can be seen in this quick story. For years, Jean-Luc Godard dismissed all of Clouzot’s movies until in 1956 when he made The Mystery of Picasso, which featured Picasso painting against glass while explaining what he is doing. To Godard, that was the movie that established Clouzot and made him a great filmmaker. Next time you try and tell me that Godard knows what the hell he’s talking about, think about what you would rather watch – Wages of Fear or watching paint dry.