La salaire de la peur also known as The Wages of Fear is a film about men who are stuck in a South American village because buying a plane ticket is beyond their means. A US oil company dominates the village, and when one of its oil wells catches on fire, four men from the local community drive trucks full of nitroglycerine across miles of rocky mountains to the oil field in order to extinguish the fire.
The movie is 131 minutes long, and the first half of the movie nothing significant or even a little bit interesting happens. It's devoted to introducing the characters and showing their day-to-day routine, but I think that twenty minutes of this would be enough to understand what's going on, an hour was just too long for a set-up, I was sitting and wondering if anything was going to happen at all. The only reason I kept watching was knowing that later I would have to write a review.
In the second half of the film we see the obstacles the truck drivers have to face on their way to the oil field, and, what's even more important, we see a reversal in the roles of the main characters. The younger driver, Mario, who used to look up to his older companion Jo, has to take everything in his own hands because Jo turns from a macho into a coward in the face of real danger. I guess this character drama is the main point of the film, and it's pretty interesting to watch it develop, but I found the whole idea too simple.
Spoiler here. The only thing that I found really good in this movie is the scene where Jo dies. No matter how mad Mario was at him, he still shed tears when Jo was dying as if he was losing the best friend. It's interesting, that when his roommate's truck explodes, he doesn't look nearly as devastated. The ending is not bad, but it's predictable. I don't recommend this movie unless you're a fan of old French cinema.
Interesting fact: Henri-Georges Clouzot originally planned on shooting the film in Spain, but Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, refused to work in Spain as long as fascist dictator Francisco Franco was in power. Filming took place instead in the south of France, near Saint-Gilles, in the Camargue. The village seen in the film was built from scratch.
Favorite quote: "Those bums don't have any union, nor any families. And if they blow up, nobody'll come around bothering me for any contribution".
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