THE WAGES OF FEAR
With Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Vera Clouzot, Folco Lulli, Peter Van Eyck, and William Tubbs.
With Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Jim Norton.
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We like to think we know what we’re getting when we go to the movies–that the credits are accurate, that the version we’re seeing (if it’s an older film) is the original one. Of course we can’t expect every theater to do what Studio-Action Lafayette does in Paris, which is to post the condition of every print it shows (good, fair, or poor) on the box office window, but we’d rather not be hoodwinked. Unfortunately, thanks to soft censorship we’re hoodwinked when it comes to the credits of many new movies–especially concerning final creative control–and often fooled or at least confused when it comes to most “restorations.”
From the opening shot–of a half-naked boy playing with insects–it’s a mean vision of a mean world, and Clouzot invites us to luxuriate in its vileness. We find ourselves in a muddy, squalid village dominated by an oil well. On a sunbaked porch in front of a saloon, sweaty, idle men trapped in town by the scarcity of work amuse themselves by throwing rocks at dogs, spraying themselves with soda water, and spitting on the floor. Many of the men are European–we hear French, English, and German spoken as well as Spanish–and all of them are trying to devise ways of escaping from this hellhole.
In conclusion, it shouldn’t be assumed that soft censorship of Clouzot began with the first American release of The Wages of Fear. A much more serious case of it occurred when he directed the very popular Le corbeau (The Raven) for a Nazi production company during the French Occupation in 1943. A creepy noir mystery about poison-pen letters in a provincial village, it wasn’t a collaborationist work in any thematic way. But perhaps because its misanthropic and antibourgeois nihilism was regarded as demoralizing by the Resistance, it was labeled as collaborationist by postwar French governmental authorities, who not only banned it but punished most of the people involved in its production, barring both Clouzot and his screenwriter from work in the French film industry for two years.
