100
Excellent, but nasty stuff.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
The New York Times by Bosley Crowther
The excitement derives entirely from the awareness of nitroglycerine and the gingerly, breathless handling of it. You sit there waiting for the theatre to explode.
75
Slant Magazine by Eric Henderson
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear now seems much less like Salt of the Earth-as-a-potboiler and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since.
100
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
Wages of Fear is the kind of motion picture for which commonplace phrases like "white-knuckle tension ride" have been coined.
60
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
A significant influence on Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this grueling pile driver of a movie will keep you on the edge of your seat, though it reeks of French 50s attitude, which includes misogyny, snobbishness, and borderline racism.
100
Here's where it's easiest to see Clouzot's advantage over his more famous peer, as he combines nail-biting action scenes - calibrated to the millimeter - with a Hawksian command of earthy performances.
78
Austin Chronicle by Kathleen Maher
This film, the inspiration for the less successful Sorcerer, is a textbook case of how to handle suspense. It has also been called the cruelest movie ever made and it certainly earns that title by the film's end.
100
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Deriving endless anxiety from brawny men moving as gingerly as possible, it’s a riveting anti-action movie, one of the most memorable high-concept pictures ever made in Europe.
80
Washington Post by Rita Kempley
A precursor of The Wild Bunch, it is an expertly directed, personally felt film.
100
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The film's extended suspense sequences deserve a place among the great stretches of cinema.