I was delighted to find that this film is, for the moment at least, available to view on a major video sharing site. This film really is for me one of the greatest films of all time. It’s got the lot. It’s got trucks, some compelling if not altogether likeable characters and the ever present fear of disaster.

The Wages of Fear is a French language movie with English subtitles originally entitled “Le salaire de la peur.” It stars Yves Montand as a drifter who has ended up in a flyblown hell-hole in South America and like many other of the bums and chancers that drink their lives away in the town, Mario, played by Montand, needs money in order to escape back to France.

The beginning of the film captures perfectly the atmosphere of ennui about the dusty hot town where most of the action is set. We see the drunks, the desperate and the down on their luck scratching a living and a life doing whatever they can do.

Into this close and claustrophobic setting comes a chance for the lost to earn enough money to get out and go somewhere better. There is a major fire at an American-owned oil well and the only way to put the fire out is by blowing it out, with nitroglycerine.

Now nitroglycerine is highly volatile and can be set off by a whole multitude of things such as a heavy bump or a rise in temperature or by being compressed. It’s nasty stuff and normally would require specialist trucks and drivers in order to transport it safely.

Unfortunately neither the special trucks nor trained drivers are available and anyway it is cheaper for the oil company to hire the town’s bums and tramps as truck drivers. The bums and chancers jump at the opportunity to earn their way out of the town with predictable results both inspiring and tragic.

This is one of those films that I remember from way back and I loved it then and I still love it now.

I hope you enjoy this one.

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