(France/1953-directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot)

Four desperate men, stranded without money or hope in a desolate town in Central America, are offered $2,000 each to drive trucks filled with nitroglycerine over 300 miles of rocky, pitted, decrepit mountain roads in order to put out a raging oil-well fire. Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear is one of the great movie thrillers – and one of the most nerve-wracking. We learn what we need to about each of these men (Yves Montand, Folco Lulli, Peter Van Eyck and Charles Vanel); the despair that brought them to this corner of the world and to their nightmarish fate is palpable, and soon the friction between them becomes as dangerous as the nitro. Clouzot (Diabolique) has staged some sequences on cliffs, bridges and washed-out roads that are as agonizingly suspenseful as any moments in film history, and they're stretched out almost beyond our ability to endure them. That's no accident; endurance and nerves are what The Wages of Fear is all about. This still-stunning, visionary work is thrilling in ways we always hope suspense films will be, yet rarely are. New 35mm print. Grand Prize, Cannes Film Festival. In French with English subtitles. (147 min.)

"An original and shocking thriller... Clouzot's most controversial film." –Pauline Kael, The New Yorker