Physical Specimens: New 4K Reviews, Including The Wages of Fear and Amadeus
This week in Physical Specimens, our biweekly round-up of new physical media, we review new 4K UHD releases of Mick Jagger’s first movie, one of the most acclaimed films of the 1980s, and a European classic that might be the most painfully suspenseful movie ever made.
The Wages of Fear
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unbearably tense thriller is finally available in 4K in America, a year after its European release, thanks to Criterion. This darkly pessimistic condemnation of the whole damn human condition might seem needlessly cruel today, but try to imagine what it must have been like to be alive in 1953, less than a decade after the carnage of World War II and the revelations of the Holocaust and the creation of a weapon that could destroy all life on earth. Who can blame anybody from that era for making a film this bleak and misanthropic, especially a Frenchman who had briefly been banned for life from making movies in France after the pragmatic but morally indefensible decision to work for a German state-owned studio in Nazi-Occupied France? The Wages of Fear is a brutal but entirely appropriate response to the death and destruction of the 20th century.
The movie’s pitch black core is clear from the first shot, where a naked child plays with cockroaches tied to a string in a pothole on a dusty road. A group of desperate, impoverished men loiter outside a rundown bar in a small South American shanty town, struggling to survive in a world that doesn’t care if they live or die. An American oil company is sucking the wealth and resources out of the unnamed country, their jobs the only solid employment around, even if the local workers are drastically underpaid and risking their lives every day. A fire breaks out at one of the oil wells, killing several of the workers and halting production; the only way to put it out requires a dangerous amount of highly combustible nitroglycerin, and the only way to get it there is to drive it in trucks across rugged terrain and barely maintained roads. Their normal drivers are union members who would never agree to such a deadly task, so the oil company offers a life-altering sum of $2,000 apiece to four of the men from the village—two Frenchmen, an Italian, and a Dutchman. They agree to haul the nitroglycerin in two trucks with a steady distance between them, in case one of the trucks explodes. The stress and fear this instills in them drives the bulk of the film, which includes probably the longest, most sustained escalation of tension in cinematic history.
That constant threat of unexpected, unpreventable explosion is obviously a direct response to the bomb and living in a world where somebody could press a button and almost instantly kill hundreds of thousands of people on the other side of the world. Clouzot’s relentless, withering contempt for American-style capitalism and corporate indifference to humanity makes just as much of an impression, especially today, as one unelected billionaire is somehow being allowed to dismantle America’s government and the whole order of the post-World War II Western world. Sure, it’s not remotely subtle when the two drivers played by Yves Montand and Charles Vanel almost drown in a sea of oil late in the film, but there’s also nothing subtle about a world that’s mechanized death on a mass scale and that allows the exploitation and corporate imperialism that drove American hegemony after the war. A movie like this needs to be inflexible in its single-minded drive towards an almost comically hopeless ending, and Clouzot doesn’t let up for a second. I don’t know if anybody could’ve made a movie like this except for a Frenchman, and it makes sense that it was one who had to make morally repugnant choices to survive during World War II. William Friedkin adapted the same novel with 1977’s similarly unflinching Sorcerer; as great as that film is, it can’t match the tension or clarity of vision of The Wages of Fear.
The Wages of Fear
Original Release: 1953
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Format: 4K UHD + Blu-ray
Label: Criterion
Release Date: March 4, 2025
