Criterion Collection 036: Wages of Fear

Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953
Time magazine called Wages of Fear "one of the most evil" movies ever made. They sure don't make them like they used to. The premise is elegantly simple: four men with nothing to lose must transport two truckloads of nitroglycerine over a treacherous three hundred mile stretch of Latin American mountain road to extinguish a raging oil field fire. The movie opens with a shot of a child playing with a cockroach marionette: certainly a foreshadowing symbol of the Southern Oil Company's callous exploitation of the four vagabonds, but also (I would like to think, at least) of Clouzot's masterful puppeteering of his audience's nerves. Not for the faint of heart.

Highly Recommended