The Wages of Fear (1953)

The Wages of Fear (French: Le Salaire de la peur) is a 1953 French thriller film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, based on a 1950 novel by Georges Arnaud.

The film centers on the fates of a handful of men who are stuck in a South American town. The town, Las Piedras, is isolated due to the surrounding desert but it maintains contact with the outside world through a small airport. However, the airfare is beyond the means of the main characters (many of whom are also non-citizens without proper paperwork for work or travel). There is little opportunity for employment aside from the American corporation that dominates the town. The company, Southern Oil Company, called SOC, operates the nearby oil fields and owns a walled compound within the town. SOC is accused of unethical practices such as exploiting local workers and taking the law into its own hands.

The first half of the film develops the main characters by examining their daily struggles. Most of the action takes place in the town's cantina. The four most prominent characters are: the Frenchmen Mario and M. Jo, the Dutch Bimba and the Italian Luigi. Mario is the main character, an optimistic Corsican playboy. Jo is an aging ex-gangster who ran bootleg, and just recently found himself stranded in the town. Bimba is an intense, quiet individual whose father was murdered by the Nazis, and who himself worked for three years in a salt mine. Luigi, Mario's roommate, is a jovial, hardworking individual, who just learned that he is dying from lung disease.

Violent Road (aka Hell's Highway), directed by Howard W. Koch in 1958, and Sorcerer, directed by William Friedkin in 1977, are American remakes. With this, Clouzot reached international fame, and was able to direct Les Diaboliques. The film was the 4th highest grossing film of the year with a total of 6,944,306 admissions in France.