In most modern suspense/action movies, we're on an adrenalin-charged roller coaster ride from the opening sequence on.
The old masters handled this sort of movie very differently. Both Alfred Hitchcock and his French colleague Henri-Georges Clouzot knew how to build suspense very slowly and deliberately, by setting an unsettling ambience, and stretching our nerves out until suddenly hitting us with everything they had. Think of the prolonged opening sequence of Psycho, which is one long red-herring constructed to deceive. Think of the relatively inconsequential opening of The Lady Vanishes, as if Hitchcock's foot is just resting on the accelerator until the moment comes to floor it.
Henri-Georges Clouzot was known in the early 1950s as 'The Master of Suspense', a tag later given to Hitchcock. We don't know or value his films nearly enough - he wasn't making films in English, and that rules him out for the mass market.
But his best films were the equal of anything Hitchcock did. His Diabolique of 1954 is one of the best murder mysteries ever put to film. And for suspense and thrill, very few films have bettered Wages of Fear.
Wages of Fear, made in 1952, is a tense thriller set in Central America, as a small group of foreigners, mainly French, sit in a barren frontier mining town waiting for the big break which might get them out of their desolate hell-hole. There are no jobs, only part-time work to help meet their bar-bills.
This is a town dominated by a US oil company. Several hundred miles away, an oil well has exploded into fire. The only way to stop the fire is to set off a nitro-glycerine explosion large enough to consume all the oxygen the fire is feeding on. The nitro can reach the fire only by road - 300 miles of dirt roads and obstacles, with the notoriously sensitive nitro likely to blow at any sudden bump or swerve.
There are two trucks full of nitro, and four men are needed for the trip. Only desperate men would take on this job. But the offer of a one-off job which would get them out of their hell-hole town and back to Europe is enough to find them.
The leisurely opening establishes the milieu of the town with remarkable faithfulness. I don't know if these scenes were filmed in Central America or not, but the seedy, sordid tone is established from the first frame, and we establish a real insight into the main characters, their hopes and their fears.
Then the chilling nitro-ride starts. These sequences were in fact filmed in the South of France on a winding narrow highway with precipitous falls inches from the side of the road. I've driven down that very highway and even without nitro-glycerine it's a ball-breaker!
That's enough to give you a feeling for the plot. To say anything more would spoil the great suspense Clouzot creates. It's enough to say that nothing in today's cinema has surpassed the extraordinary turns and twists Clouzot creates in the final hour of the movie, as the desperate ride nears its explosive conclusion.
The transfer has been taken from a vintage exhibition print with burnt-on subtitles. Some of the finer tone and contrast details have been lost, with shadow and night images losing definition.
But there are no really disruptive flaws; this is about as good as I remember the movie from film-club showings. There may be a 'Criterion' type of reissue one day, but until then, this is acceptable.
