IMDb #167 Review: The Wages of Fear (1954)

Source: Wikipedia

In the event you find yourself dangling over the pen of a zillion flesh-eating hamsters, your response is threefold. First, you panic. Understandably. As you adjust to your situation, you grow calm, maybe even bored. Amid the doldrums of the second stage, you slip into the third. A surge of elation from impending rescue. Or, more likely, things turn to shit, and you tumble to a slow nibbling death from a zillion tiny incisors.

There was a movie to talk about, wasn't there.

Right. Four poor white guys in South America need cash fast, so they take a job nobody else wants. They drive nitroglycerin trucks across the jungle. On a deadline. With zero safety equipment. And, in one case, without driving experience.

It's tough, grueling, manly work. Which means sweat-soaked tank tops plastered to chiseled torsos. (Difficult to see, because this movie looks like it was recorded through the translucent bottom of a grease-smeared milk carton.)

What's most amazing is how, once the trucks take off, the suspense stretches out for the last two-thirds of the movie. How do they do it? Characters.

There's the requisite handsome hero; his portly mustachioed roommate named Luigi (before Atari, before Pong, but not before the invention of retrospective irony); a pretty boy who survived the Nazi camps; and Mr. Jo, an aging rogue who clings to his tenuous existence via shameless cowardice.

Any significant women? Well, one, back in the village of poverty and giant spiders and copious wipe transitions. She's a coy, fey woman-child who exists to be unimportant and endure horrible treatment from the handsome hero and adore him anyway. (Pretty disgusting by today's standards.)

Anyway, these MANLY MEN rumble over bumpy stretches of unpaved road, slog through mud, and teeter over the brink of cliffs. The two truck drivers ascribe to opposite philosophies. "Danger? Slow down!" -- "Danger? Floor it!" Guess who drives in front.

Expect gratuitous close-ups of speedometers, gearshifts, tires ... and subtitles. The dialogue wanders among half-a-dozen languages, so hope you like subtitles.

What will these brave idiots sacrifice for two thousand dollars? Life? Limb? Yes, preferably other people's lives and limbs.

After all that buildup to the inevitable cathartic explosion, can be pretty draining. It almost renders the final delivery unsatisfying. But once I got past the anticlimax, the real ending clobbered me. When the end card popped up, I felt so cheated I just about exploded.

131 minutes.