Home Video Hovel: The Wages of Fear, by Rudie Obias

The post Home Video Hovel: The Wages of Fear, by Rudie Obias appeared first on Battleship Pretension.

One of the original 50 spines in the Criterion Collection (spine #36 to be exact), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear is a classic thriller that’s full of tension and suspense. It recently received a 4K Ultra HD restoration in a much-needed upgrade from its DVD and Blu-ray release. And while the film is iconic, it’s worth the double dip for cinephiles—even if they already own a previous version. But what makes the film shine with a new format is its high quality picture quality for modern TVs. It really deepens a viewer’s appreciation of Clouzot’s masterpiece and director of photography Armand Thirard’s expert camerawork.

Written by Clouzot and Jérome Geronimi (based on the 1950’s novel of the same name by author Georges Arnaud) and directed by Clouzot, The Wages of Fear features life in an isolated town of Las Piedras in South America. The town is ruled by an American oil company that only cares for profits, even at the expense of people. After an explosion in an oil field, four men accept the job to transport nitroglycerin across rugged terrain to extinguish the flames and cap the well.

The film follows these four men going from point A to point B with volatile nitroglycerin transported in two trucks. Every twist, turn, and bump in the road could spell doom for these four men who are down on their luck and desperate for money—even for $2,000 each (about $24,000 in today’s money).

If Alfred Hitchcock is known as “the master of suspense,” then Henri-Georges Clouzot is known as “the master of tension.” The Wages of Fear is just as effective at creating tension between characters and scenes as it was back in 1953, while directors, like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, ape his style of filmmaking and editing techniques.

The Wages of Fear is highly influential, which is why it was remade a few times with William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and the new Netflix action film also titled The Wages of Fear by French director Julien Leclercq. The movie feels modern, even though it was made more than 70 years ago.

The Criterion Collection has done a great job with the 4K Ultra HD restoration with its sharp and pristine picture quality with uncompressed monaural soundtrack. However, a majority of the release’s bonus features were pulled directly from the older DVD release. It does have a few additional features, like a special about the film’s restoration process from 2017 and modern trailers of the film itself and new box art from Spanish illustrator Juan Esteban Rodríguez.

The main event is the 4K restoration of The Wages of Fear, which is the reason for an upgrade, especially if you own the DVD release and own a big screen 4K TV. It would be a perfect companion to the Criterion Collection’s release of Sorcerer coming in June.

The post Home Video Hovel: The Wages of Fear, by Rudie Obias first appeared on Battleship Pretension.

The post Home Video Hovel: The Wages of Fear, by Rudie Obias appeared first on Battleship Pretension.