Written by Andreas Babiolakis

This review is a part of the Palme d’Or Project: a review of every single Palme d’Or winner at Cannes Film Festival. This is a Grand Prix winner: what the Palme d’Or was originally called before 1955. The Wages of Fear won the Grand Prix award in 1953.

The film was selected by the following jury.
Jury President: Jean Cocteau.
Jury: Louis Chauvet, Titina De Filippo, Guy Desson, Philippe Erlanger, Renée Faure, Jacques-Pierre Frogerais, Abel Gance, André Lang, Georges Raguis, Edward G. Robinson, Charles Spaak, Georges Van Parys.

Oh, Henri-Georges Clouzot. This director can sure make anyone feel sick to their stomach with anxiety, and he absolutely needs to be a part of the conversation of best creators of tension within film. Case in point, let us dive right into The Wages of Fear: a two-plus hour minefield of nervous sweating, panting, and squirming. Not only is this film a standout example of harrowing cinema for its time, it is flat out one of the most nerve wracking watches I think I have ever had. Clouzot is an expert of knowing what notes to use and when, as to toy with his audience. Think anyone is safe? You'd be wrong, but also you will know how you were misled after the fact. The Wages or Fear is pressurized storytelling to the max, with a basic premise and a hell of a lot of stress involved; Clouzot gets by with only a few ingredients to make this masterful meal of sorrow.

Before we get into the crux of the story, we need a bit of character build up: Clouzot's appetizer to prepare you for the disasters that await you. We meet four different labourers: Jo, Mario, Luigi, and Bimba. They each have their own goings-on that make them unique, ranging from Luigi slowly dying from an ingestion of cement dust, to Jo being a former criminal trying to live a new life. They all make their way to this epicenter names Las Piedras: an isolated town with nothing but barren wasteland around them. The entire area is dominated by an oil company that most people seem to work for, and this very company is about to drop its biggest bombshell: there is a massive fire at one of the job sites, and a group of martyrs have to put it out with a nitroglycerin explosion (nitroglycerin itself being insanely delicate and dangerously easy to set off).

So we follow this suicide mission with the four men selected for the job (who else but the characters listed above?), whose hidden identities, motives, and moral compasses come into play. As we follow the two trucks carrying nitroglycerin in every awful scenario imaginable, we know what true horror feels like. There aren't any fictitious monsters or ideas out to get us: only realistic job concerns that people have had to legitimately worry about throughout the course of history. We partake in this diabolical quest without any hope that these four characters will see the other side, and yet we cannot look away. No matter how terrifying or risky the last event was, things only progressively worsen. Right until the bitter end.

Each scenario is given the utmost dedication by Clouzot and company so nothing is ever a breath of fresh air. Every second of this mission hurts. You have no idea what awaits you as you keep watching. The Wages of Fear does such a great job establishing who these people are, all the particulates of this journey, and all of the bases worth noting. We can't try and cycle through any additional outcomes or possibilities in our heads whilst watching. We have to accept what Clouzot gives us, and he isn't exactly a warm storyteller. Modern films like The Hurt Locker and The Revenant that owe a lot to the testing of an audience's thresholds owe a lot to Clouzot and The Wages of Fear: it keeps up with these contemporary panic-fests, quite frankly.

While a piece of riveting cinema, The Wages of Fear is additionally a much more real conversation: the willingly sacrificial environment known as industries (blue collard, white collared, any collared) that have no regard for their employees. This film calls out the companies that don't appreciate those that put every ounce of energy and effort into their jobs whilst their lives are on the line on a frequent basis. Many large corporations don't care about the wellbeing of their lowest level employees, and it shows time and time again. The Wages of Fear puts faces on those that are required to tempt fate in order to make money and even survive in a ruthless society that won't help those that are suffering. There's no Steve McQueen or other form of a superstar here that romanticizes tragedy: only characters to embody those that actually have lived through these kinds of events. The Wages of Fear is incredibly thrilling, but it is also unfortunately quite authentic.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.