#36: The Wages of Fear
Good morning, friends!
Hey, when’s the last time you saw Saving Private Ryan? Josh and I watched it this weekend and it is an absolutely enormous piece of propaganda BUT it is also very good and I didn’t realize how much I needed Tom Hanks during this pandemic. I also just need to cry at a war movie every once in awhile. How ‘bout you?
#36: The Wages of Fear
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Country: France
Year: 1953
Runtime: 147 minutes
Language: French
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
CW: Domestic abuse, suicide, death
We begin in a tropical, rural, and impoverished Spanish-speaking town called Las Piedras (country unknown). For the first 30 minutes I really didn’t know what was going on besides that. I’m realizing a symptom of this newsletter is that I have a very hard time when I don’t *immediately* know everyone’s name or a general plot arc. This is because it’s very hard to write about things you don’t understand (duh) and also because I just don’t like not knowing what is happening here or otherwise HA
What I eventually pieced together is that in this town there are no real jobs, except odd ones, and no way out. There are no trains, the highway just ends after a while, and airfare is prohibitively expensive. The only real work is for a corrupt and exploitative American oil company called Southern Oil Company (SOC).
For reasons I still don’t understand, there are lots of foreigners living here. There’s a Frenchman named Mario (Yves Montand), a German man named Bimba (Peter van Eyck), and an Italian man named Luigi (Folco Lulli). Eventually, another older rich-looking Frenchman named Jo (Charles Vanel) arrives in a white suit; he had to get out of France quickly and the ticket to Las Piedras was cheap. He and Mario instantly bond based on their shared nationality. Also, Jo isn’t really rich, he’s just got one nice suit.
There’s also a local woman, Linda (Véra Clouzot), who Mario dates and treats terribly. This is a Criterion movie, babes.
Jo, an ex-mobster, causes a lot of ruckus in town because he’s bad at socializing but everyone pretty much hangs out together in the single cantina. What else is there to do?
Mario explains to Jo that the town is “like a prison” because it’s easy to get in and impossible to leave. Hunger and disease runs rampant. Mario dreams of leaving.
As Mario is showing Jo around Las Piedras, they arrive at the SOC compound where the workers live and work (and are, disturbingly, buried in large numbers due to their frequent deaths from terrible work conditions). Jo recognizes the American foreman, Bill O’Brien (William Tubbs), as someone he knows. It’s unclear how they know each other, but Jo asks him for work. There isn’t any. As they’re leaving, they see Luigi, Mario’s roommate, who works for SOC as a cement brick-maker.
Also, a really interesting experience of watching this movie is that there are so many languages (Italian, French, Spanish, English) that I often didn’t know which was being spoken, besides English. Also, there are a lot of donkeys in this movie and it made me wonder if donkeys are underrated? What do we think?
A few days after Jo arrives, there is a huge fire at one of SOC’s oil fields 300 miles away. There have been thirteen victims, all of them locals. Nearby, a bunch of White American dudes from SOC sit around problem solving how to put out the fire.
It turns out the only solution is to drive two trucks full of nitroglycerin (which apparently extinguishes fire?) the 300 miles from Las Piedras to the site of the fire. But! Nitroglycerin is extremely sensitive liquid and will cause a massive explosion if it is disturbed at all. The road to the fire is unpaved, rocky, and full of obstacles, and the trucks have no shock absorbers. So, the job is super dangerous.
Of course, the SOC guys know they need to find some non-union workers--"bums”--to do the job because 1) if they die completing the mission, no one can come after SOC and 2) they’ll work for peanuts because everyone is poor and desperate for money.
SOC announces the job to the public. They need 4 drivers and will pay $2,000 per person. I calculated it and if this movie took place the year it came out, 1953, that would be about $20K in today’s money.
Mario, Jo, and Bimba realize this is their escape out of Las Piedras. Luigi, who has just found out he has cement in his lungs, was advised by his doctor to leave Las Piedras ASAP. They all apply and they are all hired. Well, Jo was not originally hired, but the fourth man who was hired “mysteriously” did not show up to the first day, so Jo was his replacement. Once a mobster, always a mobster?
The night before the mission, in a display of how grim it all is there, a young man named Bernardo (Luis De Lima), writes his mother a letter telling her he got a job and then hangs himself. Someone calls him “the first victim of Mr. O’Brien.”
The men take off in the two trucks: Mario and Jo in the first truck and Luigi and Bimba in the second. And when I say “take off” I mean they are going probably 6 mph because--remember--any significant bump could blow them up. They are ordered to stay 30 minutes away from each other to lessen the chance that they lose both trucks in an explosion.
Soooooo the tension of a flammable liquid is a new and unique experience of tension, I gotta say. It’s an unseen force, a silent but constant ticking bomb, and it is sort of agony the whole movie?
As they drive through town, Mario’s girlfriend Linda jumps on the truck and says a tearful goodbye. He tells her to get lost, opens the door on her, and flings her into the mud. 😑
We learn a LOT about the men during this trip. We learn Bimba survived the Nazis but was orphaned. When Luigi asks him how old he is, he replies, “A hundred. Takes just a few weeks to get to a hundred if you’re at the right place at the right time.” Luigi, on the other hand, is social and open and positive.
Mario is confident and reckless and Jo, formerly a tough guy, is showing his true colors under the pressure: he’s terrified but won’t admit it. He’s so terrified, in fact, that they have to stop on a road in a bamboo forest so he can puke. Luigi and Bimba catch up to them, and annoyed with their slow pace, decide to pass them.
OBSTACLE #1: “The Washboard”
“The Washboard” is a stretch of road that is named for its bumpiness. Bimba’s theory is that if you go 40 mph or faster, you fly over the bumps. Under 30 mph, you vibrate, and--in this instance--explode. Mario shares the same theory with Jo whose solution is to go even slower than 30, like 6 mph. Unfortunately for Mario, Jo is driving.
Luigi and Bimba drive fast over the bumps and almost make it without incident. They have to stop short of the end because they have a gas tank problem. Luigi leaves a white handkerchief in the road to warn Mario and Jo that they are stopped ahead, just in case they catch up to them.
Jo isn’t listening to Mario’s instructions at ALL. He wants him to speed up as they approach the washboard, but slams on the brakes before they reach it, blaming it on the truck. They have to back up so they have time to speed up again.
They try again with Mario at the wheel.
They are coming in hot as Luigi and Bimba, having fixed their gas tank, are driving sloooowwwwww to complete the end of the washboard without incident. Unfortunately, a local working a road stand removed the white warning handkerchief from the road so Mario doesn’t know the other truck is ahead.
😬😬😬
Luigi and Bimba, seeing Mario coming, have to decide to speed up and risk vibration, or stay at their slow speed and risk a collision. My armpits were ON FIRE with anxiety. They decide to keep their pace. Mario gets within an actual inch of Luigi’s ass but they never collide.
OBSTACLE #2: The Construction
I’m not going to try to explain the mechanics of this, but there is just lots of backing up onto a janky wooden platform off of a cliff, okay?
Luigi guides while Bimba drives. Of course, their back tire falls through a broken wooden plank, but they manage through it. Again, being wonderful citizens and friends, they warn Mario and Jo by putting sticks over the hole.
As soon as they approach the obstacle, Jo wants to give up, seeing it as insurmountable. Mario, the driver, says they’ll just have to go right up to the edge of the wooden platform. Jo’s counterpoint: he sticks his knife in the wood which is as soft as a sponge. They fight about whether the job is worth the money. Mario: Sure. Jo: Absolutely not.
Standing behind the truck as Mario backs up to the edge, Jo disappears. Mario gets out of the truck, thinking he’s fallen off the cliff. But he soon sees him climbing up the cliff, ignoring Mario’s calls.
Mario gets back in the truck and manages to drive off the wooden plank and around the construction while Jo watches and cowers behind a rock and Josh and I bite our nails completely off. As Mario pulls away, barely escaping, the entire wooden platform crumbles behind him.
Mario passes Jo in the truck and forces him to chase after him.
Back in the truck, Mario gives Jo a bunch of shit for being a coward and Jo gives the coward’s logic which is: I’m actually being smart. Both of them are right! It IS a dangerous, absurd job. It is also very much a problem that Mario is being left alone to handle the job they both signed up for. And this is a lesson in being mindful of your emotions and honest about your limits.
OBSTACLE #3: The Boulder
As they approach the boulder in the middle of the road, Luigi says, “This is too much.” Which is the correct response. What ever will they do? Blow. That. Shit. up.
Mario and Jo catch up to them as Bimba is very carefully filling up a thermos with some of the nitroglycerin. I again am not going to explain the mechanics of this solution, but it involves a hammer, a thermos, a string, a lighter, and a palm branch. Before he lights the string that will blow up the boulder, Bimba says goodbye to Luigi and Luigi and Jo drive the trucks far away from the blast site. Watching this blonde man pour nitroglycerin down a stick into a hole was the most stress I'd felt all week. Hated it.
At the last minute, afraid rocks on the cliffs above will be disturbed by the blast and fall on the trucks, Luigi runs to put out the burning cord so they can move the trucks. Mario and Bimba run up the cliff, while Jo, paralyzed by fear, stays in one of their trucks, bracing as the boulder explodes.
Luigi obviously doesn’t make it to the fuse. He is knocked out but survives.
To celebrate, they piss on the site where the boulder used to be. Why men?
As Bimba and Luigi continue their journey, Bimba shaves in the passenger seat. He says, “If I’m going to be a corpse, I want to be presentable.”
Soon after, Luigi and Bimba’s truck blows up unexpectedly. Mario and Jo see the explosion in the distance.
UGHhhhhh.
OBSTACLE #4: The Oil Pit
They don’t know what happened, but when they arrive at the explosion, Jo and Mario find no truck nor bodies, but a crater filling quickly with oil from a burst pipe. The only way out is through this almost waist-deep oil pit. Jo guides as Mario drives. The catch, of course, is that Mario can’t stop the truck or he will get stuck. Jo, standing in front of the truck to gauge the depth, gets sucked under and can’t get up. Mario, not stopping, runs over Jo’s leg, crushing it below the knee.
Right before exiting the crater, Mario gets the truck stuck in the oil anyway. Mario devises a plan that requires a pole and thick rope to get him out of the oil.
Somehow this works and they’re back on the road.
In the car, Jo is not doing great. He’s completely covered in oil and says he can smell his leg rotting off and his fingernails are purple. Mario tries to keep him alive by talking to him about Paris. Jo talks about a fence in his childhood neighborhood.
He says, “The fence...what was beyond the fence? [...] Nothing!” Jo dies right before they arrive at the site of the fire. Mario holds him in his lap and weeps.
Covered in oil, Mario gets out of the car, stumbles toward the flame, and collapses into a deep sleep. He is the sole survivor of the mission.
The next day, the fire is out and Mario gets a $4,000 check from SOC and a truck (sans nitroglycerin) to drive back to Las Piedras. On the drive home, Mario’s having a great time, swerving all over the cliffside road. We see flashes of his friends, including Linda, back at the cantina dancing in celebration of his imminent return.
As Linda collapses on the dance floor, Mario accidentally drives the truck off the cliff. He is instantly killed.
FIN
When I first thought about what I would write about this movie (because I had a lot of ~thoughts~), I kept thinking about how well this movie illustrated what it’s like to live in poverty, to be trapped in it, and to be desperate to get out. This line of thinking, though, if it doesn’t evolve, can start to hyper-focus and treat poverty like a condition. But poverty isn’t a condition that one is born with or otherwise “catches.” It’s not some amorphous evil that one is either unlucky enough (or--depending on how much a person’s worldview sucks--deserves) to experience or lucky (or, again, deserving) enough not to. It is a position that those with the power to intentionally and systematically place people, place people; they use that same power to keep them there.
In this movie, the people with the power are an American oil company called SOC; more precisely, the men who make up the company. And the victims of their power are, seemingly, indiscriminate: Americans, Italians, Germans, Frenchmen, and of course all of the locals of the unknown Spanish-speaking country this movie is set in. If you live in Las Piedras and are in need of $$$, SOC is in charge of your life and your health.
And the real kicker with capitalism, (is there one real kicker with capitalism?) is it’s more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich. These four men needed the $2,000 so they could have better lives and get out of Las Piedras and, ironically, out from under the thumb of SOC. They just had to pay with their lives, is all.
I don’t know if the director, Clouzot’s, ultimate message re: Mario’s death is that no one can truly escape capitalism or if he was taking a rare, hard stance against shitty men like Mario and punishing him for his treatment of Linda. Josh noted that Mario was also just being reckless and perhaps the message is simply that it finally caught up to him.
Either way, I left the movie remembering that poverty is not the disease, it is the symptom. And the first step, of course, is to recognize that you are sick. Unfortunately, in America, it seems we’re not even close to taking our temperature.
Up next is something completely different than anything we’ve watched so far: fantasy! It is a 1981 film called Time Bandits and I can’t WAIT for this break from reality. Join me?
XOXO,
Steph