The Wages of Fear is a weird movie to recommend, because I have complicated feelings on it. I think that in the end it winds up being a good movie, but I also think it’s strange that this movie has gone on to become the classic that it’s known as. For starters, this is a black-and-white subtitled foreign movie from the 1950s, which already makes it hard to recommend for people to watch. But aside from that, I found the movie to waver in quality so much throughout the movie that it’s hard to think about it as a whole.

The basic story in the movie is that there has been a fire that’s sprung up from an oil well, and it can only be contained through nitroglycerine, a chemical that’s highly volatile and will explode if not handled properly. This urgent situation puts four men on a mission to transport a large shipment of the nitroglycerine to the fire. They don’t have the proper safety equipment to do this, and the terrain they must transfer it over isn’t exactly smooth sailing, and so the slightest jolt to the truck will cause it all to explode.

It sounds like an exciting premise, right? I thought so too. The main problem that The Wages of Fear has is that it’s way too long, though. It clocks in at about 2 and a half hours, and I think it’s the biggest barrier to recommending it. And it’s not inherently the length of the movie that’s the problem (God knows I love Gone With the Wind, and that’s a four hour movie), but it just feels unnecessarily long. It takes 45 minutes for the men to even be given their mission, and so the premise of them driving with the nitroglycerine doesn’t even actually start until an hour into the movie.

This is what I meant earlier when I said that the movie just kind of wavers in quality. I was bored to tears in the beginning of the movie. I couldn’t believe how long it took the movie to get going. And okay, I understand that you’re not going to have the characters setting out on the mission at the very start of the movie. There’s some necessary exposition and character development that needs to be done, but my whole point is that I think that the first 45 minutes could have easily been done in about 15 instead. This would have made the entire movie way more digestible in my opinion.

However, with that being said, once the men set out on their mission, I think this movie is absolutely fantastic. This is one of the earliest examples in film that I’ve seen of suspense being done remarkably well. The simple plot point that the nitroglycerine could go off in a life-ending explosion makes every little bump or close call insanely tense. There are so many amazing situations that the drivers are put into where it seems like they’re about to die. When you get to these points in the movie, it’s easy to see why it’s become so well-regarded, since there were plenty of parts where I was completely on the edge of my seat.

But yeah, in the end it becomes a weird movie to recommend. I understand that a lot of people won’t even try it simply because it’s old, black-and-white, subtitled, or a combination of the three, but even for people that are okay with all of that it becomes difficult for me to truly recommend it. I think that once you get past the first hour the movie becomes insanely good, but it’s a weird thing to say for a movie that the first hour isn’t good. If you have a high tolerance and can get past the beginning, then I think the movie is definitely worth watching. I think that if the movie shaved off about a half hour from its beginning, I would have thought this was really amazing. But instead, it’s kind of a mixed bag.

3.5/5