The Wages of Fear

Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (French: Le Salaire de la peur) won the Palme d'Or at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival the same year, making it one of only a handful of films in cinema history to win the top prize at both major festivals in a single edition. It also won the BAFTA for Best Film at the 7th BAFTAs the following year. The film's reputation as one of the greatest sustained-suspense works in the medium has only grown across the seventy years since its release.

The film is adapted from Georges Arnaud's 1950 novel of the same name. Clouzot (France's leading thriller filmmaker, having made Le corbeau (1943) and Quai des Orfèvres (1947)) co-wrote the screenplay with Jérôme Géronimi. The cast pairs Yves Montand (then primarily known as a singer rather than as an actor; this was his breakthrough into international film recognition) with the Italian actor Folco Lulli, the German Peter van Eyck and the Mexican émigré Charles Vanel, who won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his supporting performance.

The film was shot largely on location in the Camargue region of southern France over an unusually long six-month schedule. The original release was substantially cut for the U.S. market by Howard Hughes' RKO Pictures, with most of the political content removed; the full director's cut was not seen in the United States until the 1970s. The film was remade by William Friedkin as Sorcerer in 1977, a commercially unsuccessful but critically reappraised production that was effectively buried by the simultaneous release of Star Wars the same summer; the original Clouzot version remains the canonical reference.