silver nitrate notes

The Wages of Fear and Armand Thirard's Truck

5 oct 2018

Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) made The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur, 1953) in a format that did not yet have a standard name. Two American studios had passed on the project. Clouzot shot it independently in southern France and Camargue, on a budget that required improvisation in the daylight hours of summer 1952. The cinematographer was Armand Thirard (1899-1973), a reliable French DP who had shot Clouzot's earlier thrillers.

The plot is simple. An American-owned oil company in South America needs two trucks driven through bad roads with an unstable cargo of nitroglycerine. The company offers a large cash payment to whoever will drive. Four desperate expatriates accept. They are given the trucks. They try to reach the delivery point alive.

What Thirard does across the second half of the film is photograph a truck. He photographs it from inside the cab with the drivers. He photographs it on the road from long tracking setups. He photographs it from low angles as it crosses improvised bridges. He photographs it from above. The truck, loaded with nitroglycerine, becomes the visible protagonist. The men are supporting characters to their own cargo.

The famous sequence is the one at the Washboard, a long stretch of corrugated dirt road that must be driven either very fast or very slow (any intermediate speed shakes the nitroglycerine enough to detonate it). Clouzot shoots the sequence at ground level with the camera static, letting the two trucks come into and out of frame at different speeds. The difference in speeds is the entire suspense. Thirard had to calculate what rate of camera movement would match what rate of truck movement to preserve the contrast. The calculation is in the shot.

The film was recut for American release. Scenes that American audiences might read as anti-American (specifically, the opening sequences in which the oil company is portrayed as exploiting local workers and not caring whether its drivers live) were removed. The recut version ran twenty-five minutes shorter. The current Criterion edition restores the full French cut. That is the version to watch.

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sources
[1] Bocquet, José-Louis. Henri-Georges Clouzot cinéaste. La Sirène, 1993.
[2] Mazdon, Lucy. Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema. BFI, 2000.
[3] Arnaud, Georges. Le Salaire de la peur. Julliard, 1950 (novel).
[4] Thirard, Armand. Interview in Cinémonde, April 1953.