105 min, No rating, Black & White, Available on videocassette and laserdisc
Also known as LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR.
An existential thriller--the most original and shocking French melodrama of the 50s. The opening sequence shows us a verminous South American village and the Europeans trapped in it; they will risk everything for the money to get out. An oil well 300 miles away has caught fire, and the oil company offers four of them $2,000 each to drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerine (to explode out the fire) over primitive roads. The four are a Corsican (Yves Montand), a Frenchman (Charles Vanel), an Italian (Folco Lulli), and a German (Peter Van Eyck), and the film is about their responses to the gruelling test of driving the trucks. When you can be blown up at any moment only a fool believes that character determines fate. In this situation, courage and caution are almost irrelevant, and ordinary human responses are futile and archaic--yet nothing else is left. If this isn't a parable of man's position in the modern world, it's at least an illustration of it. Henri-Georges Clouzot directed his own adaptation of Georges Arnaud's novel. His most controversial film, it is also his most powerful; the violence is not used simply for excitement--it's used as in Eisenstein's and Buñuel's films: to force a vision of human experience. With Vera Clouzot and William Tubbs. The music is by Georges Auric; the cinematography is by Armand Thirard. Awarded the Golden Palm at Cannes. Originally released in the U.S. in a cut version, partly because of the film's length (156 minutes), and partly because of nervousness about how Americans would react to the sequences touching on the exploitative practices of American oil companies; the footage trimmed was later restored. (You can see the influence of this picture in Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH.) In French.
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