I chose this film because it was available on Watch Instantly on Netflix.  It’s a French thriller and the title appealed to me.  I didn’t really know much else about the movie. It turns out to be a classic.

The Wages of Fear (the French title is: Le Salaire de la Peur) is a directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and stars a young Yves Montand.  It is based on a novel by Georges Arnaud.

Alfred Hitchcock had an intense rivalry with Clouzo and also tried to purchase the rights to the novel but was unsuccessful.  It is a Hitchcock worthy film with its own very distinct French identity.

The premise of the film is incredibly simple.  A large American oil company has several oil rigs in an unnamed South American country.  The workers have their own town behind the company gates– houses, cafeteria, stores, etc.  The nearby village exists on a meagre hardscrabble hand-to-mouth basis. Undocumented workers (from a variety of countries) who are no longer needed or were fired for cause by the company can’t get back to their homelands because airfare is too expensive. Their boredom and desperation are palpable.

A thuggish French grifter, Jo (Charles Vanel), flies into their midst (it was as far as $50 would take him).  Mario (Yves Montand) a young down-on-his-luck Frenchman is immediately entranced by his fellow countryman’s swagger.  Jo is a bully and takes it upon himself to humiliate Mario’s genial Italian roommate Luigi (Folco Lulli).

Jo pushes and pushes Luigi until finally Luigi threatens Jo with a broken bottle.  Jo raises his gun, Luigi backs down saying Jo is a big man because he has a pistol.  Jo hands the gun to Luigi and taunts him challenging Luigi to shoot him.  Luigi can’t and Jo slaps him and taunts him again.  Luigi gives the gun back and leaves saying that he is not a murderer.  This establishes Jo even more strongly as someone who fears no one and nothing.

When one of the large company oil wells explodes and catches fire several hundred miles away, the company offers to hire four men at an exorbitant $2000 each to drive two trucks over mountain dirt roads.  They will be carrying the nitroglycerine needed to blow up the well and extinguish the fire.  Mario, Luigi and Bimba (Peter van Eyck) are chosen.  Jo disposes of the other driver selected and takes the forth spot himself.

The company doubts that any of the men will make it alive but it’s the only chance to stop the fire.  The drilling boss says: “They don’t belong to a union, and they don’t have any relatives, so if anything happens, no one will come around causing trouble.”

The nitro is unstable and liable to blow at any hard jolt, the trucks lack adequate suspensions and the roads are third-world horrible.  The ride is an unrelenting journey of nail-biting suspense.  The direction, editing, psychological make-up of the men and the simple road hazards that could take their lives in an instant make the film much more suspenseful and nerve-wracking than any Hollywood extravaganza about the whole world ending.

Although the film is almost 60 years old it is amazingly contemporary.  The perils of the oil industry, how easily all things petroleum go terribly bad, how simple it is to exploit desperate people and how the same qualities that make men/women heroes (boldness, brashness and taking incredible risks) are the same qualities that also doom them.  It’s as urgent and compelling as it would be today.  It’s shocking how little we have learned from the various catastrophic oil disasters over the years– and how we keep making the same mistakes, are filled with the same hubris and have so little desire to change our ways.

Yes.  Those are all problems in my own life.  I’m looking at how my greatest strengths are also my greatest weakness, what mistakes I keep making repeatedly and where my own hubris has often blinded me.  It’s a nerve-wracking ride in its own way.  The answers (and solutions) aren’t far away.  And I have another 29 days.