DAY 9. Thrillers!

Forget your standard-issue action movies where the hero waltzes through gunfire with a quippy one-liner. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear is the cinematic equivalent of a panic attack stretched across two and a half hours. It makes modern thrillers look like Sunday afternoon cartoons.

We find our quartet of heroes — if you can call them that — rotting away in Las Piedras, a South American backwater that serves as a collective drain for the world’s losers. There’s Mario (Yves Montand), a sarcastic Corsican playboy; Jo (Charles Vanel), a washed-up Parisian gangster whose tough-guy veneer is paper-thin; Bimba (Peter van Eyck), a stoic German haunted by the death of his father in a concentration camp and Luigi (Folco Lulli), an Italian cook who has just received a death sentence in the form of a lung condition.

They are trapped, broke and desperate. When a massive fire erupts at a Southern Oil Company well, the corporation — which effectively owns the town and treats the locals like disposable biological hardware — offers $2,000 to anyone willing to drive two trucks loaded with unstable nitroglycerin over 500 kilometers of terrain that would terrify a mountain goat.

We don’t just watch the suspense. We’re passengers. The middle hour is a relentless, pulse-pounding crawl through a series of impossible obstacles, such as a stretch of road so poorly maintained it creates rhythmic vibrations guaranteed to trigger a detonation, a wooden platform that requires driving backward and a boulder blocking the path that requires a precision-timed blast, leading to the harrowing demise of Luigi and Bimba.

The dynamic between Jo and Mario is the film’s psychological core. As the trip progresses, Jo’s legendary gangster grit dissolves into pathetic cowardice, forcing Mario to reconcile his hero-worship of the older man with the reality that Jo is a liability, not a leader.

Everything about this production screams cinematic nightmare, which only adds to the grit on screen. Filming was paused for seven months due to financing issues. When it resumed, torrential rains hit, flooding the set and keeping the cast and crew trapped in a Nîmes hotel for over a month. Then, Clouzot broke his ankle, several dozen local Romani extras went on strike, and the pyrotechnics used for the oil fire sequence nearly turned the actual shooting location into a massive wildfire.

The legendary Jean Gabin famously turned down the role of Jo, fearing that playing a coward would ruin his image as a screen idol. We also almost missed out on Montand; both Gérard Philipe and Serge Reggiani were considered for the role of Mario. The role of Linda, Mario’s devoted and tragic lover, is played by Véra Clouzot, the director’s own wife, adding an intimate, mournful layer to the film’s cynical conclusion.

The film’s ending is the ultimate universe-is-laughing-at-you punchline. After surviving the literal impossible, the triumph is rendered utterly hollow by a moment of reckless, post-traumatic hubris. It’s a gut-punch that cements the film’s status as a bleak, existential work of art.

The Wages of Fear brought Clouzot international fame, winning both the Golden Bear and the Palme d’Or at the 1953 Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals, respectively. Its success allowed him to direct another film that has lived on past the director, Les Diaboliques.

If this all sounds familiar, well, it’s been remade several times, and its influence hasn’t always been called out. Violent Road AKA Hell’s Highway was directed by Howard W. Koch (Ghost, The Odd Couple) and stars Brian Keith; a 2024 French Netflix remake and even an episode of MacGyver, “Hellfire,” in which MacGyver is thrust into an emergency when an oil well erupts into an uncontrollable fire, and he must traverse rugged terrain to retrieve volatile, aged dynamite from a remote mine.

The best-known remake is, of course, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, which is more faithful to Georges Arnaud’s novel. Is it any happier? Let’s ask Friedkin: “I wasn’t prepared for my success or failure. I felt … buffeted by fate without any control over destiny. That’s one of the themes of Sorcerer. No matter how much you struggle, you get blown up.“

You can watch this on Tubi.