Movie Nation

Stanley Kubrick was among the most famous filmmakers to assert that if you can’t tell what’s happening in a film — the emotions and motivations of the characters and the point of it all — with the sound turned off, that film and filmmaker have failed.

“The Wages of Fear,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterful thriller about desperate men taking on a desperate job, is a case in point.

A tale from the edge of civilization about the sort of men trapped there, of Big Oil (American) imperialism and how cheap life is to them, it remains a study in nail-biting suspense over 70 years since its mid-1950s release.

The fact that it’s in French, Spanish, Italian, a little German and English suggests it is the images, the archetypes and cinematic semiotics that will tell this story. With or without subtitles — a restored print that the streamer Tubi is offering now has none — the archetypal casting, washed-out and desolate black and white cinematography (by Armand Thiraud) and pulse-pounding editing by Madeleine Gug, Etiennette Muse and Henri Rust underscore the international image language that cinema was always meant to be.

Yves Montand stars as Mario, a French dead-ender in remote Las Piedras (The Stones), South America, a dusty, dry and mountainous land we assume is Venezuela. Or Bolivia or Peru. Las Piedras is a two-street/one airstrip village that was changed when an oil refinery was built at the end of the pipeline there.

“Wherever there’s oil, there’s Americans.” Mario growls.

None of the many men from many nations trapped there has the money to fly out, but Mario clings to his Old World dash, no matter how soiled his suit, and his memories of Paris and fierce desire to return. He keeps his “lucky” Metro (subway) ticket as a talisman, hoping he’ll get to ride that again.

The arrival of a bribing tough, Jo (Charles Vanel, who first appeared on screen in 1912) gives Mario somebody new to hang with among the Brits, Americans, locals, and the Nazi salt mines survivor Bimba (Peter van Eyck) and the jolly Italian baker Luigi (Folco Lulli) who lounge aroung Pepito’s store and cantina.

Linda (Véra Clouzot, the director’s wife) is the star attraction there. The beautiful waitress and scullery maid only has eyes for Mario.

A deadly blowout and fire at a Southern Oil Co. well 300 miles away kills many, but as the cynical local SOC rep (William Tubbs) sees it, it creates opporunity for the locals, especially the Euro-drifters. O’Brien promises to “manage” the locals and the press with a “blame the victims” strategy. And he’ll get that well fire out on the cheap, loading two trucks with unstable nitroglycerin and paying $2000 a man to the four men who will slowly drive it cross country 300 miles in 24 hours.

A cursory driver’s test/contest puts Jo and Mario and Bimba and Luigi behind the wheels of two hulking five ton trucks. As they putter along at 6, 7, 10 or recklessly as much as 40 miles per hour, facing engine trouble, extreme terrain, road blockages and the like, we’ll soon find out who’s really tough, really clever at working problems out on the fly, and who isn’t.

Like “Sorcerer,” its most famous remake (Netflix attempted a more modern one last year), the original film, based on a novel by Georges Arnaud, takes its sweet time establishing the “Treasure of Sierra Madre” milieu and the rough, characters trapped there. William Friedkin went to all the trouble to showing us “how” his drivers ended up at the (jungle) ass-end of the world, with “Sorcerer” backstories showing crimes that put the lot of them on the lam.

Clouzot lets his casting — the dashing singer just-then-turning-actor Montand, crusty Vanel, van Eyck suggesting to 1950s audiences that there were “good Germans” and Lulli’s sad, equally desperate gregariousness — do that for him.

I loved the jungle quest nature of “Sorcerer,” with that locale setting up its iconic rope-bridge-in-the-rain sequence. But Clouzot’s dusty, sunbleached South America (the South of France, actually) could be just as challenging. Rear projection shots of the driving aside, the actors make us feel the tension, the seething resentments and the greed they experience behind the wheel, or fleeing from the truck when their nerves get the better of them.

Mario freaks out over Jo’s temerity behind the wheel and puts his own foot on the gas pedal. Luigi seems like an Italian pushover until we see him in a tight spot. And there are plenty of those, with frequent reminders that nitroglycerin was never something you wanted to shake in liquid form.

This film’s lore includes the leading men getting very sick from the work conditions of the set, and American censorhip when “Wages” was released in the U.S. Nobody in official Eisenhower Era 1950s America wanted union-busting, life-wasting greed in the form of Big Oil and its most devoted minions depicted on screen.

But we’d miss that today if Clouzot hadn’t gone out and told us what’s now accepted fact. There are companies that will do anything for a buck, including figuring out how many people they can afford to kill before it impacts their stock price. It isn’t just oil companies operating that cynically.

“The Wages of Fear” feels both quaintly “period” and bluntly modern, which is one reason it’s THE bucket list film for action cinema fans. This is a classic that reminds us of the compromises we all make, and the math we’re all capable of when we’re desperate enough.

That’s universal, something anybody speaking any language can see and understand, with or without subtitles, with or without admitting it to themselves.

Rating: TV-14, violence, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast: Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli, William Tubbs, Véra Clouzot, Dario Moreno and Peter van Eyck.

Credits: Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, scripted by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi, based on a novel by Georges Arnaud. A Cinédis releasee on Tubi.

Running time: 2:29 or 2:35