The Wages of Fear (1953)

The Wages of Fear (French: Le Salaire de la peur) is a 1953 thriller film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Henri-Georges Clouzot, adapted from Georges Arnaud's 1950 novel of the same name, and starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck and Véra Clouzot. The film centres on a group of four down-on-their-luck European men who are hired by an American oil company to drive two trucks, loaded with nitroglycerin needed to extinguish an oil well fire, over mountain dirt roads.

The film brought Clouzot international fame—winning both the Golden Bear and the Palme d'Or at the 1953 Berlin Film Festival and Cannes Film Festival, respectively—and enabled him to direct Les Diaboliques (1955). In France, it was the fourth highest-grossing film of the year with a total of nearly 7 million admissions. Retrospective reviews have also been highly positive, in 2019, the film was ranked No. 9 in Empire's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema."