In Vera Cruz, an assassin wearing dark glasses and white patent leather shoes shoots a rich man in his apartment. (In this film, you can tell assassins because they have white shoes.)
In Jerusalem, three young men in yarmulkes (one is carrying white shoes) blow up a building. Only one of them escapes death or capture.
A rich man gazes out a window onto a Parisian street. He is troubled; life weighs heavily upon him; he is French. He and his intellectual wife of ten years talk a little philosophy, then he goes to sit in a hostile office and face corruption charges which will lead to disgrace and incarceration if he doesn't come up with a great deal of money very quickly. His partner in crime shoots himself, and we watch the rich man stumbling away up the road.
In New Jersey, Irish gangsters infiltrate an Italian Catholic wedding. The gangsters slip into a back room and rob the place, shooting a priest. They quarrel as they drive away; the car crashes. Only Roy Scheider survives to limp away. We see the Italian mobsters vow revenge.
When these four men recur, they are all inhabiting the same poverty-stricken mud-village somewhere in South America, a village ratfucked by the American oil company which is the only employer in the region. The only hope of escape any of our criminals have is to take on a suicidal mission: the company is offering bulky wages and proper citizenship to four men who will drive unstable explosives over terrible roads to quell an oil well on fire.
This, then, is William Friedkin's reimagining of Clouzot's classic Wages of Fear. It came out in 1977, and this, my friend, is how to write, shoot, and edit a film. The unvoiced details (do filmmakers even use those anymore?), like the bride's black eye as she promises to love, honour and obey, or the names painted on the old death-trap trucks they have to drive (one is called Lazaro, the other, which looks like it has teeth, Sorcerer), or the wary way the convicts eye one another while working in the village, each wondering which is the assassin sent for him, tell the story with minimal verbiage. The editing is flawless. Friedkin uses the camera to tell the story, shaking it only once, when it's running with the police to arrest the terrorists, and once we speed with it along a French street, and once, marvellously, at the end, we back with it away from a scene of peace in a ramshackle saloon, out through a screened window, then lift smoothly upwards and turn slowly to reveal the arrival of a crucial taxi. The camera movement communicates, somehow, that this is all destined. It is like a humbler but still quietly breathtaking version of Antonioni's final shot from the Passenger, which has to be on anyone's short list of the most magnificent end-shots to any film, ever.
It's closing in on the '80s, so there's synth music, but this time it actually works in the story's favour, a Tangerine Dream suspense-track which uses subtle dissonance to build tension. And tension there is. The rope/rotting wood bridge passage is nearly unbearable. Then there’s Scheider, with that classic, rugged, scarred but endlessly emotive face, giving another of his world-class performances.
Is it great enough to call it an overlooked classic? I think so. It's got some flaws: a few clichés, visual (the wasteland reflected in his windshield seems to swim around his head as he goes mad) and spoken (“What will you do with all that money?” “Get laid.”), but they are dwarfed, in the end, by virtues. Although it will always take a back seat to the Exorcist and French Connection, it's still one of Friedkin's greats, and one of Scheider's.
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