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The Wages Of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur), based on the 1950 novel by Georges Arnaud, and adapted for the screen by director Henri-Georges Clouzet and Jerome Geronimi, premieres in Paris. In an isolated South American backwater, four down-on-their-luck desperates accept the local American Petro-Chemical company's lucrative offer to drive two truckloads of highly unstable nitroglycerine to a burning oil rig some 300 miles deep in the impossibly treacherous jungle. The film wins both the Palme d’Or and the Golden Bear at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals, and catapaults Clouzet and a young Yves Montand to international fame. In 1958, Howard W. Koch’s little seen, black & white knock-off Violent Road (a.k.a. Hell’s Highway) relocates the story to a semi-urban US setting, while William Friedkin’s exemplary Sorcerer, from 1977, goes back to the Amazon jungle to give Clouzet's masterpiece a run for its money.
