Special Screening - The Wages of Fear

The Wages of Fear

Henri-Georges Clouzot

France, 1955, 148 min

TIFF Bell Lightbox - Reitman Square
350 King Street West

“Spectacular. One of the most breathtaking thrillers ever made. No other show in town can match The Wages of Fear for the purely gut sensation it prompts, the kind that makes you laugh out loud as the heart threatens

to go on permanent hold.”— Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“150 minutes of pure, unadulterated terror.” — Mike D’Angelo. A.V. Club

“A significant influence on Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, this grueling pile driver of a movie

will keep you on the edge of your seat.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

New full-length Print!

A newly struck, full-length print of “One of cinema’s most revered thrillers” (Danny Peary), which Pauline Kael called “the most original and shocking French melodrama of the ‘50s.” Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, The Wages of Fear opens in a hellish South American village metaphorically called Las Piedras, where four impoverished, hard-luck men are chosen by an oil company to drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerine over primitive roads to the site of a distant oil fire. Headed by a French-born Corsican (Yves Montand) and a duplicitous, middle-aged braggart (Charles Vanel), the men drive through a landscape that seems designed to make their volatile cargo explode. Cut by nearly twenty minutes for its original North American release, the film was released a decade ago in its full-length version, which restores scenes reportedly censored for hints of homosexuality and their scathing depictions of American corporate recklessness and exploitation.

The Wages of Fear will screen as part of The Wages of Fear: The Films of Henri-Georges Clouzot, a complete retrospective on France’s own “Master of Suspense” that will run from October 13 to November 29 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.