Review of The Wages of Fear (1953) by Daniel K — 23 Nov 2009

3: Quality genre picture, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I was hoping I would. These characters just didn't quite do it for me, when I compared them to gangster, noir, western archetypes from 1930's-1950's Hollywood.

It was still quite engaging and interesting to see how this director did it in France, but it wasn't revelatory, like it apparently has been for some over the years. The opening scene of the love interest washing the floor is about as close to revelatory as it got.

This was pretty damn close to be sure. I can think of few scenes like it that compare favorably. It keeps one towards the edge of their seat, but not on it, if you will. The mix of languages and cultures is interesting, but I somehow felt there was something missing from the story and the characters development.

Now that I think about, I suspect part of it is that it was partially outside the traditional constriants of the genre, which made me less familiar with the film's constructs. A good, solid genre piece has the rest of the films that came before to build upon, so a certain shorthand is available.

One isn't just experiencing this world, but all the worlds one has previously inhabited up on screen. This lacked a bit of that history for me, which somehow made it slightly less effective. The journey along the road is quite entertaining and thrilling, but I'll take someone like Hitchcock any day of the week.

The inevitable conclusion was just as it should be as well. One thing I didn't necessarilly pick up on were the supposed anti-American leanings of the film. It never crossed my mind while watching the film that this would have been significantly censored for Amnerican audiences.

The main reason for this is undoubtedly my temporal separation from the period in which the film was released; cold war era Red scare methodology was definitely not on my radar. Sure one could view it as anti-American, but perhaps more importantly it is anti-exploitation, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalistic.

One could easily make the same picture centered around a French, British, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, etc corporation.