Clouzot's classic suspense thriller WAGES OF FEAR has an interesting history. It won the Grand Prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, with the best actor award going to Charles Vanel, and the British Film Academy named it the best film of 1954. But it wasn't released in the USA until 1955, and then only after the American distributors had removed nearly all of the scenes in which Clouzot denounces American oil companies for exploiting, oppressing, and endangering non-union workers in Latin America. When my father took my brother and me to see it, he warned us that people infected with the witch-hunt mentality of McCarthyism had gutted the film's political message, and he encouraged us to imagine the excised scenes so we could fully appreciate Clouzot's intent.

I was only 13 at the time, but it was easy enough to do what the old man had suggested, and I was so impressed by what I saw (and imagined) that for a year or two WAGES OF FEAR was my favorite film. In 1991 Criterion finally released the original 148-minute version of the film with all of the excised scenes restored. Frosty and I watched it a few days ago, and I was surprised to discover that while the restored scenes make their point clearly and strongly, they are not nearly as virulent and anti-American in their condemnation of the oil industry as I had imagined them to be.

The story takes place in and around Las Piedras, an isolated village in an unspecified South American country. The natives, dressed in rags, impoverished, diseased, and crippled, watch listlessly as American representatives of the Southern Oil Company, puffed up with an inflated sense of self-importance, tool busily around in their jeeps, splashing mud in all directions. But the village is also populated by a polyglot assortment of unemployed European drifters who sit around all day, better dressed than the natives but every bit as listless, sipping lemonade, fanning the flies away, and bitterly lamenting the fact that they're trapped in a pestilential hellhole with no way of scraping together enough money to buy a ticket to the coast. Four of these ne'er-do-wells, the Corsican Mario (Yves Montand), the Parisian Jo (Charles Vanel), the German Bimba (Peter Van Eyck), and the Italian Luigi (Folco Lulli), are given a chance to escape. All they have to do is drive two big trucks full of nitroglycerin over 300 miles of mountainous terrain on a badly rutted, rock-strewn dirt road, after which the Southern Oil Company will reward them handsomely by paying each of them two thousand dollars.

The first half of WAGES OF FEAR, the part that takes place in the village before the truck journey begins, is flawed by the inclusion of a character named Linda (Vera Clouzot). Linda looks weirdly out of place in Las Piedras. She's nothing more than a decorative ornament inserted to provide a pretty face, some cleavage shots, and the semblance of a romance with Mario. (In this regard, WAGES OF FEAR reminds me of the Werner Herzog film FITZCARRALDO, also set in South America. The producers insisted that Herzog create a role for Claudia Cardinale so that Klaus Kinski's character would have a girlfriend. But Kinski's character is a madman whose only passion is for opera. Cardinale tags along, valiantly trying to provide "love interest," but she's obviously an extraneous afterthought, and the movie would have been much stronger without her.)

The presence of Linda is not the only flaw in the first half of WAGES OF FEAR. Many of the secondary characters have that "colorful" quality that was de rigueur in Hollywood at the time, and some of the interactions between the main characters are also much too Hollywoodish. For example, there is a confrontation between Jo and Luigi in a bar. Luigi threatens to whack Jo over the head with a bottle, but Jo pulls a gun, and Luigi backs down. To prove that he is a brave man and Luigi a coward, Jo then hands the gun to Luigi and dares Luigi to shoot him with it. This little routine is pure cliché. It serves an important purpose in the development of the characters, but that purpose could have been and should have been accomplished in other, more realistic ways.

The second half of WAGES OF FEAR is a masterpiece of nail-biting suspense and unexpected character revelation. Clouzot achieves an exquisitely nerve-wracking level of tension in three extended scenes during the truck journey. Audiences and critics raved about these scenes when the film was first released. All three scenes have been copied numerous times in subsequent movies, but they still retain their archetypal power when seen today, 50 years later. Even better than the suspense itself is the revelation of what happens to Mario, Jo,Bimba, and Luigi when they're trapped inside the pressure cooker of fear. We gain an impression of each man in the first half of the film, then see in the second half that the truth about each man – the deep truth – is just the opposite of what we thought. Clouzot's study of courage and cowardice is charged with cynicism and irony. Conventional wisdom tells us that bravery is an attribute found only in those who are paragons of wisdom and virtue, but Clouzot insists that men who are stupid and villainous can sometimes be very brave indeed, and that bravery for the wrong cause is absurd and pointless, not heroic.

WAGES OF FEAR has many complementary strengths. The dramatic musical score by Georges Auric adds greatly to our growing sense of foreboding. Cinematographer Armand Thirard makes excellent use of light and shadow to create a dark, doom-drenched, film-noir atmosphere. The acting during the truck journey is highly realistic, both gripping and convincing, with especially fine performances by Vanel and Montand. (Prior to this film, Montand was a popular music hall singer, not an actor. Everyone was surprised by the high quality of his acting, and the positive response launched him on a new career.) And Clouzot makes masterful use of visual metaphors to underscore the movie's themes. The first shot in the film is a close-up of four or five large, cumbersome beetles. Each beetle has a bit of string knotted around its thorax, and the other ends of the string are tied to each other. The beetles crawl through the dirt in different directions, but they can't escape from the net that holds them loosely together. The camera pulls back. We see a half-naked little native boy crouched over the network of bound beetles. He's using a stick to lift the beetles and flip them around. He dangles them, tangling the bits of string, then drops them back on the ground. Suddenly he hears the singsong voice of a vendor pushing a wooden cart with bells on it. The boy discards the beetles and walks away to check out the vendor. The camera moves on, showing us the squalor and filth of Las Piedras, and we quickly forget about the beetles, just as the little boy himself has quickly forgotten about them. It is only later, after the movie is over, that we will (perhaps) remember this opening moment and understand its symbolism. Big oil companies treat non-union workers in undeveloped countries in exactly the same way that little boys treat insects.