I haven't seen Sorceror, William Friedkin's 1977 remake, so I can't comment on it. But seeing the original really calls attention to the subsequent strait-jacketing of action films, which today are more or less the sole province of American cinema. Where it's de rigeur for today's action pictures (which seem to operate in perpetual fear of losing the audience's attention for even a moment) to open with a breathless set piece, Clouzot's film takes its time getting started. Where Hollywood pictures are populated by smart-mouthed but noble (and cute!) specimens of manhood, the little Central American village of Las Piedras is populated by desperate men at the end of their ropes. They mistreat women and champ at one another like dogs. Finally, rather than pursuing the time-honored Hollywood traditions of upholding the law, saving the world, or even just clearing their good names, these protagonists are only in it for the money.

As Clouzot's camera wanders through town, it begins to home in on a handful of characters. Yves Montand plays Mario, an impeccably coiffed Corsican drifter who wears a stylish jacket over his dirty white T-shirt. Mario takes an immediate liking to new arrival Jo (Charles Vanel), a well-dressed bullshit artist with big ideas aplenty but neither a job nor a penny to his name. Mario's roommate is Luigi (Folco Lulli), a friendly but proud Italian whose ill health demands that he find a ticket out of Las Piedras. Lurking on the sidelines is an amiable blonde German named Bimba (Peter Van Eyck).

Promised $2,000 a head if they live through it, these four men agree to tackle the ridiculously hazardous task of trucking tons of nitroglycerin through 300 miles of rough road and mountain passes. But the job isn't even mentioned until 40 minutes into the movie. And the journey itself doesn't begin until fully one hour into the 148-minute film. As Clouzot knew well, such deliberate pacing only heightens the tension. For one thing, we spend enough time with the characters to appreciate their foibles -- for instance, that the most outwardly self-assured of these men turns out to be the worst kind of coward. Clouzot also has time to conjure the film's setting (a dusty town in an unnamed Central American country) as a fully inhabited world. By the time those four men depart the town, we feel as though we know the landscape, and have an appreciation for the characters' desire to escape it.

Women, it's clear, go basically unappreciated. Clouzot's wife Vera appears as Linda, a local who spends her time scrubbing floors (allowing her blouse to gape fetchingly) and taking crap from Mario, with whom she's desperately in love. Later, she'll be pushed off one of those trucks and into the dirt as he leaves town. One hopes that Clouzot intends to indict Mario's dismissive attitude toward his ostensible girlfriend -- Mario's attentions are redirected to Jo, who only gets him into trouble.

But Clouzot is busy bringing other concerns to the fore, such as the exploitation of local workers by the resident gringos. Indeed, the opportunity to drive those trucks presents itself only after an explosion at a refinery kills 13 townspeople and sets a mountainside ablaze. What's interesting is that the European expatriates wind up being just as exploited as the unfortunate locals, sent on a suicide mission in search of a reward that may prove purely hypothetical. The real villains of this piece are the American oilmen. ("Wherever there's oil, there's Americans," Mario explains at one point.) The Standard Oil Company turns to the town ne'er-do-wells and drifters after ascertaining that unionized men would squawk at a fool's errand such as this. Somebody notes that desperate men will work for peanuts, but local boss Bill O'Brien (William Tubbs) is determined to pay a fair salary for the job -- thus the $2,000 pay-off.

Clouzot is an efficient, canny filmmaker who makes the most out of just a few well-chosen edits. As Jo checks out his truck, he slaps one of the tires and asks about the air pressure. He's only pretending to be have the situation in hand, and that shot draws our attention to the tires of the truck. As the trucks begin to roll, Clouzot shows us one of the tires in close-up, pressing against the pavement. As the film moves on, more inserts of those tires will be fraught with significance, as the drivers struggle to gain footing in the mud, to stay steady on a bumpy stretch of concrete, or to navigate a rickety platform made of altogether rotten wood. Even on a 27-inch screen, these sequences are formidable nail-biters.

Armand Thirard's black and white cinematography is served well by Criterion's DVD, which boasts solid blacks with good shadow detail and relatively high contrast. The source material could be in better shape, I suppose -- the print suffers from no more damage than you'd expect, and a cleaned-up soundtrack helps minimize the distractions. The edges could be sharper, but on the whole this image is so film-like, with only the hint of compression artifacts, that there's no need to quibble. Like the 1991 theatrical reissue, Criterion's disc restores about 20 minutes' worth of cuts that made the film more politically palatable on its original U.S. release. (That's right -- not only was the film trimmed for time, but the anti-American sentiments were removed.) The disc includes no supplemental material.

There is some room for interpretation of what's most important in this film. According to historian Georges Sadoul, Clouzot himself claimed to have made "an epic whose main theme is courage -- and the opposite" while critic Pierre Kast described the film as "a tragedy about the absurdity of blind industry." Whatever Clouzot was really up to, his bleak vision makes Hitchcock, to whom he has often been compared, look like a softie. (Hitchcock's worldview at least allowed for the charm of a Cary Grant and a black chuckle here and there.) If you choose, as I do, to read its vision as both despairing and relentlessly cynical, The Wages of Fear may be the bridge between Luis Bunuel and Sam Peckinpah.