You might not think of a black-and-white 1950s film as the perfect thing to put your home cinema through its paces. But there are few more cinematic experiences than The Wages of Fear, an influential thriller that'll have you on the edge of your seat.
Director Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 classic is a masterpiece of suspense, cranking up unbearable tension and heart stopping moments. Watching it on a premium projector or high-end home cinema setup, and it's a nerve-shredding and utterly gripping spectacle.
The Wages of Fear is available to stream on BFI Player, or you can pick it up as a restored Criterion Collection 4K Blu-ray (do not, under any circumstances, confuse it with the 2024 Netflix remake). The original has a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it’s easy to see why.
A group of dissolute drifters are marooned in a run-down South American town with no cash for a ticket out. The only money in this sun-scorched hellhole is on the other side of a heavily-guarded fence, where an American oil operation is busy extracting oil from the desert.
As violence erupts among these desperate men, a job finally appears, for more money than they could even dream of. The only snag? It's a suicide mission.
Our dubious heroes are hired by the oil company to drive truckloads of nitro-glycerine across twisting, turning mountains. The nitro is both highly explosive and extremely temperamental: a single bump and all that would be left of them is a giant hole in the road and no one to mourn.
It takes a while for the film to get into the trucks, but the early slow-burning scenes are worth savouring for their simmering atmosphere.
We meet Bogart-esque Yves Montand, vicious Charles Vanel, loveable Folco Lulli and ice-cool Peter van Eyck. And we’re inexorably mired in this savage world where life is cheap and plane tickets are expensive, laying bare the degradation and brutality of profit-driven exploitation.
But once the engines start and the film's wheels begin to turn, the nail-biting suspense kicks in. Sometimes the drivers must race at murderous speeds, and at other times they have to inch forward with their lives hanging in the balance.
From an eerie night-time scene where the cans of nitro are painstakingly loaded aboard the trucks, to a devastating scene involving an oil spill, every squeal of a tyre, every creak of timber, and every bead of sweat from the exhausted drivers feels like it might trigger catastrophe.
Clouzot’s stark black-and-white cinematography comes alive with the deep contrast ratio of a decent home cinema setup.
Trucks and men are dwarfed by landscapes that your projector can stretch across the entire wall, emphasising the fragility of man against unforgiving nature – before bringing you back to a close-up of a trapped wheel, a cable on the verge of snapping or a wild-eyed driver.
You’ll find yourself leaning forward, not only drawn in by the terrifying anticipation of each near-miss, but also to take in the film's gritty, filthy texture. It’s a reminder that even films made seventy years ago can feel hair-raisingly immediate.
The Wages of Fear becomes a showcase for how silence can be as thrilling as bombast, and how monochrome can dazzle as much as HDR. It's a raw, cynical film that not only tests your kit – it tests your nerves.
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