William Friedkin followed The French Connection and The Exorcist with this ferocious reworking of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear. Four desperate men, each hiding from his past in a grim South American backwater, take on a near-suicidal job: driving two battered trucks loaded with old, sweating, dangerously unstable dynamite 218 miles through the jungle to put out an oil-well fire.
It takes its time getting going, but once the trucks are on the road the tension barely lets up, and the rope-bridge crossing in a raging storm is one of the most nerve-shredding sequences ever filmed. Roy Scheider is superb as a hunted getaway driver, and Tangerine Dream’s pulsing electronic score adds to the unease. It arrived a month after Star Wars and flopped, but it has since been restored and rightly rediscovered as a lost classic.
If you like the sweaty jungle peril of Predator or the hard-edged crime of Heat, this is well worth tracking down.
Abbreviated Cast List