Back in the Ipswich Film Theatre, half-full for this restored print of Friedkin’s minor classic. I might have seen the Wages of Fear, but if I have I can’t remember when. Friedkin expands the story in a bold opening, stitching together three long sequences which introduce the key characters, all renegades of one form or another, living on the edge of their country’s laws. The long shots, the zooms, have a bravura feel, which echoes the scope of a film that moves from Mexico to Palestine to Paris and New York in the opening twenty minutes. These characters come together in the Colombian jungle, on an oilfield run by the gringos. The colonial aspect of the story is clear: the USA wants the oil and it will do anything to get it. This sets up their trip through the jungle, two souped-up lorries like something out of a Mad Max film. The fact that there are two trucks, as in the original, is a simple but brilliant device to maintain tension. One of the trucks is going to get to the destination, but we don’t know which one. Friedkin is a dystopian anarcho-futurist. A kind of Verlainian Marinetti. These trucks are behemoths, but they are also, literally, timebombs, primed to go off. It makes for scenes of forced but remarkable tension. There’s elements of Aguirre to the movie, the challenge of the white man to tame the untameable terrain. Although the one who survives will be brought down not by nature, but by man.
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