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The preamble hopscotches from Vera Cruz to Jerusalem to Paris to New Jersey, with material drawn from Sabotage, Criss Cross and Topaz, among others. The poem on the ease of killing states the existential theme ("In seconds my gesture would remove her from this world / And me? Whose gesture would remove me?"), to illustrate it there's the marked robber (Roy Scheider), the disgraced banker (Bruno Cremer), the terrorist bomber (Amidou), and the taciturn assassin (Francisco Rabal) toiling in the mud. The squalid pueblo is ruled by dictators and oil companies, rebels detonate a well so nitroglycerin must be transported 200 miles in the jungle, four "suicide jockeys" are recruited. "Read about this place in a travel brochure?" Even before getting to its sweltering purgatory, William Friedkin's maudit analysis of The Wages of Fear soaks in a brutish world, from a holdup in a church to a zoom in on a bride's bruised visage. The getaway car turned and mangled or the volatile truck with the earth crumbling under its wheels, death comes abruptly and meaninglessly in a variety of landscapes. Eventually the road becomes a lunar surface under a nightmarishly bluish light, at the end awaits a column of fire. Friedkin retains Clouzot's brackish worldview and adds plenty of perversities of his own—the contrast between glazed escargot in a fancy restaurant and splattered brains in the parking lot, the effect a shovel has on a guerrilla fighter's jugular, the peculiar eroticizing of the village's one woman, a toothless crone. The title is linked to a key image, the stone warlock grimacing at the fools who die for a dollar and expect redemption. "May you find happiness and satisfaction in your work." Antonioni's The Passenger figures obliquely in the punchline. With Ramon Bieri, Peter Capell, Karl John, Friedrich von Ledebur, Chico Martinez, and Joe Spinell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |