After a long wait William Friedkin's adaptation of The Wages of Fear finally got a restored release in 2017 so we can all enjoy its bleak diesel powered suspense in pristine condition. For one reason or another this is never discussed as often as The Exorcist or The French Connection, despite it being up there with his best features. Perhaps this is due to it being a remake, perhaps it's the title, or maybe the impact of a movie called Star Wars coming out at the same time is still being felt. Cinema was dead, and blockbusters were in. But make no mistake this is an edge of your seat thriller that mixes both the nail biting vehicular action of Popeye Doyle's hunt for drug runners with the disturbing existential dread of Father Karras battling the infernal. It deserved to be a hit then, and it needs to be seen today.
It's a simple story; a group of desperate men risk their lives for a large sum of cash to be paid on the delivery of two trucks full of unstable explosives. Their goal is a burning oil derrick which can only be accessed through poorly maintained roads and very unforgiving terrain. The original film version of Georges Arnaud's novel is still counted as a suspense classic of European cinema, so you can understand why contemporary critics would be against a Hollywood remake. It's a natural reaction that I can sympathise with entirely. But while the 1953 film certainly has a lot of intense sequences when the trucks begin moving, there are lots of areas for improvement particularly in the first half of the story.
In the first version the band of drivers were down on their luck, looking for ways to escape their poverty in a sadder, more melancholy way. The pacing early on leaves a lot to be desired in a story which is stretched out to nearly two and a half hours. I appreciate that it takes its time and explores the relationships between of all the characters, but it's often meandering and feels too relaxed for a story about people who are in dire straits and will take a job that could easily kill them. There's a certain romantic element to it all as they look for ways to escape the baking sun whether it's turning to hard graft or getting drunk in run down bars.
However in the Friedkin adaptation everything is far darker and more dramatic. You could say it's just sexing up the story by adding more death and mayhem. But you could also say that it's taking the themes of the original and putting the pedal to the metal in ways that are both logical and incredibly effective. The first act is now a riveting thriller in which all the characters come under considerable duress whether it's as a result of terrorism, financial ruin, or robberies gone awry. It makes sense that they have all tried to escape their homes by hiding in Central America, and that they will think nothing of taking risks when the time comes - jumping head first into the proverbial (and literal) fire.
The sense of danger is ever present even before the boxes of dynamite dripping with nitro-glycerine are required. There are murders and suicides, there's civil unrest and threats from both assassins and anti-corporate dissidents. It's a relentlessly harrowing story where these characters seem to be forever trying to escape the inevitable despite having put themselves in these situations to begin with. This is all accentuated by the style of film itself, which combines Friedkin's usual striking documentary visuals with a constantly oppressive location. The climate - both politically and in terms of weather - is something that creates an incredible atmosphere throughout as the story moves from the aftermath of a drilling accident to the torrential rain of the region.
As in The Wages of Fear, the most memorable sequences still involve rickety trucks carrying a deadly cargo through the worst roads imaginable. This time around things are really pushed to their limits with a series of obstacles that are as visually stunning as they are nerve-racking. The conditions look incredibly treacherous in set pieces that are a technical marvel as well as a masterclass in suspense. The atmosphere created is one of both edge of your seat action and claustrophobic horror; the terrain is relentlessly bad and characters start to come apart at the seams and things go from bad to worse, to even worse still. A pulsing electronic score by Tangerine Dream just adds to this already moody series of events in ways that make it undeniably 70s but also provides a pulse to the story.
The look and feel of it all can be summed up by the montage scene where the trucks are built up from scrap for one last job - like the characters themselves. Ready to break at at minute but pushed forward by circumstance. It's a bleak but often beautiful looking film, full of searing red fires and lush green jungles, something that captures the wild look of the Dominican Republic but still manages to feel surreal and alien. It has both a gritty, oily, filth encrusted feel but at the same time is often vast and ethereal as the camera swoops in above the misty road ways. It's an oppressive, violent story full of people at the edge of their existence, but it's also a consistently entertaining mixture of adventure and peril. If there was ever a movie that shouldn't have been forgotten in the wake of other pop culture hits then this it.
