January 09, 2004
La Salaire de la Peur
I was up late a couple of nights ago and caught Le Salaire de la Peur (1953) on AMC. Fortunately, it was subtitled as my German is quite rusty and Italian nearly non-existent. 
It's predominantly a French film, that is, it has both a French director and a largely French cast but throughout the film the actors speak French, German, English and Italian pretty much interchangeably. The title translates as "The Wages of Fear". It was directed by Henri-Georges Cloutzot, a brilliant French director. He wrote and directed something on the order of twenty films, one of which was "Les Diaboliques" (which I learned he beat out Hitchcock in optioning the script). In any event, this particular film is absolutely stunning, starting out with a gradual pacing that sets up the tension later in the film. The long lead-in lets us get to know the principal characters (this was one of the first films of French heart throb and singer Yves Montand).
Montand later went on to do many films, including the seminal John Frankenheimer film Grand Prix (1966), and the wonderful Jean de Florette (1986).
Back to the film. A motley band of adventurers down on their luck are stranded in a little Venezuelan town because of financial reasons. After an oil well fire occurs in an even remoter region four of them are offered positions as drivers by the local American oil company. Their mission: drive trucks full of nitroglycerin 300 miles through moutains and jungle to the oil well so that it might be used to put out the fires. It's a suicide mission, but that's just the start of our journey into an exploration of fear, bravery, fatalism, and friendship.
This film was eventually re-made as Sorcerer (1977) with Roy Schneider. Not in itself a bad film but a pale shadow of the original B&W film.
Sometimes one has to wonder why Hollywood remakes films. I can only imagine that they felt that Americans would find the original inaccessible.
Surely it wasn't a lack of imagination.
Posted by artandscience at January 9, 2004 09:27 PM