From the Rental Vault (1955): The Wages of Fear

Movie clichés come in more than just hackneyed phrases -- the car chase is a well-known offender, sometimes stuck in a mediocre movie as a way of artificially building suspense. Will the speeding cars go out of control? Will the pursuing hero catch the villain? Or will the fleeing protagonist elude the hunters? Will the passers-by at risk suffer injury or death? When a writer or director knows the story at hand is kind of dull, the thought may be that a vehicular chase can transfer its own inherent tension to the movie. If it's not working, then down comes the order: Hit the gas! Ramp up the speed!

But as French director Henri-Georges Clouzot demonstrated in his 1955 movie The Wages of Fear, sometimes you don't have to send your autos across the screen at top speed in order for them to carry real tension. Sometimes, in fact, the slower they go, the higher the suspense.

Of course, it helps to load them up with unstable nitroglycerine and send them across a mountain road barely hacked out of the jungle. A U.S. oil company in South America has a well on fire and the only way to put it out is with an explosion big enough to temporarily suck the oxygen away from it and in essence "blow it out." Nitro will do it, but a steep mountain road that in some places is barely more than a trail lies between the field and its nearest supply. The company's union drivers refuse to make the trip, so a lottery choose four people in the village to make the drive. The first half of the movie introduces us to the quartet, a group of small-time losers with their own stories of why they need the substantial cash bonus the company will pay to drive the nitro to the field. The second takes them across the road, beset with obstacles and wondering any second whether or not the unstable explosive in their trucks would blow up and wipe them out.

Clouzot was at the top of his game as a suspense director (he would make the equally classic Les Diaboliques later that same year) and helped his powerhouse cast -- top French actors Yves Montand and Charles Varnel, German-American Peter Van Eyck and Italian Folco Lulli -- elevate what in some hands might have been a genre picture into a top-level nail-biting character study without so much as a single peel-out. Wages won the Palme d'Or at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.

Howard Koch would remake Wages as Violent Road in 1958, a movie that's not so bad on its own but which suffers greatly compared to the original. Exorcist director William Friedkin released his own version, Sorcerer, in 1977 with Roy Scheider as his lead. Friedkin spent a lot of money and the movie made back little of that, suffering in the shadow of a little movie called Star Wars that came out a month earlier and confusing people by having no supernatural elements at all, no matter what the title was. Sorcerer's welcome has gotten better with age, but Wages of Fear is still significantly superior.