In a remote South American town, four men are hired by an American oil company to transport two truckloads of nitroglycerin to an oil field, to put out a fire. It's a very hazardous task - the nitroglycerin can explode for the slightest reason, the road is treacherous and the journey is a long one. However, the money is very good and their current situation in the town is rather dire - they will do anything to improve their situation.

Great thriller-drama by French director HG Clouzot. Starts slowly and even once the hazardous journey is in progress, it doesn't seem that brilliant. However, Clouzot builds the tension and from a point it is absolutely nail-biting stuff. The scene with the boulder has to be one of the most tense movie scenes I've watched in my life.

A good character-drama too - the way the characters develop and the relationships between the four change adds a new dimension to the drama and makes for very engaging viewing.

Not perfect though. Some events and plot devices don't make much sense, though aren't crucial to the movie. The ending felt quite silly and contrived. A similar result but with a more plausible, less predictable, less stupid way of getting there would have seen the movie get a perfect score.

As a kid watching TV shows and movies in The Fifties, I can't tell you how many I ran across that had nitroglycerine as part of the plot. There were at least a couple of Westerns along with straight dramas, but it didn't seem to matter the genre. A souped up hot rod carrying four quarts of nitro that just happened to be hanging around was used by the main character to destroy "The Giant Gila Monster" in a campy 1959 monster flick.

Whatever the fascination with nitroglycerine, and it had to be it's unpredictability, the idea of carrying around a ton of it was the premise of this film, "The Wages of Fear". Actually, it was two trucks carrying a ton of nitro between them, I guess to heighten the drama and provide twice as much in the way of nerve shattering tension. The thing is, unlike a host of reviewers who hold the picture in the highest regard, I really didn't get a whole lot out of the movie.

For starters, the first forty five minutes or so was used to introduce characters and situations that eventually had nothing to do with the outcome of the story. Yves Montand portrayed his character Mario well enough, but the guy was just a reprobate for the most part. He consistently berated the lovely saloon gal Linda (Vera Clouzot), and actually threw her in the dirt when he drove off on the mission to deliver the goods. Same thing with his partner Jo (Charles Vanel), who started the picture as one of film's ruggedest macho men, and turned into a cream puff when the going got tough. I just didn't understand how characters would just suddenly switch their basic personas as the story progressed.

Then there's the adventure on the road. Maybe I missed it, but what was the rationale for that wooden bridge turnabout that both drivers had trouble with? Was it that the size of the trucks wouldn't allow for a smooth ninety degree turn? Even so, after the first mishap with the truck driven by Bimba (Peter van Eyck), why would Mario feel compelled to back his truck right to the very edge of the unstable platform? It didn't make sense to me.

And then, showing his contempt for Jo, Mario runs him over in that manic oil pit scene. I have to admit, that was the stunner for this viewer. That scene had both actors earning their paycheck, and it rivals the clay pit scene in "The Defiant Ones" with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis for sheer insanity, in another Fifties action flick. Both are just hellacious, you be the judge.

Except for that scene, most of the rest of the story didn't hold the same amount of interest for me. When the truck with Bimba and Luigi (Folco Lulli) blew up, I thought that it would have been better served if there was a close-up of the two men in the truck hitting a rut and offering a grimace just before fading to black and then showing the explosion. That would have better sealed their fate; I had to wonder why no one thought of it.

With all that, I don't mean to imply this was a terrible picture. It's watchable enough, but just doesn't seem to measure up to the accolades it's given as an IMDb Top 250 film. But that's the case for a lot of others as well, so in this case, maybe it's just me. On another day I might have seen it in an entirely different light.

After wading through the early exposition, I settled into this film and found it to be about as tense as any I've seen. The people in the small village are literally in prison. We even see a shot of the shadows off a trellis superimposing prisoner's stripes on the people who pretty much wait for something to happen. When a job opportunity arises when an oil company needs men to drive truckloads of nitroglycerin to a fire site, they arise from their sloth and head into an encounter with hell. This is so much more than a simple adventure. We begin to be fascinated by each of the characters as well as the peripheral ones. We root for them and die with them. When one of them turns cowardly, we understand the kinds of forces that are working on him. When one of the trucks eventually blows up, it appears as a flash and little puff. How delicate are our lives. There are different kinds of escape and these people embrace their chance. The wages of fear are 2000 dollars, not much for a man's life, but creates adventure. The performances are outstanding as well as the pacing and first impressions don't mean much when people are all on the same plane.