The Wages of Fear
Upon returning to France, he was offered a script written by Georges Arnaud, an expatriate living in South America who had written about his own experiences there. Clouzot found it easy to imagine the setting of the script and was very anxious to film Arnaud's story. He started writing the film, "The Wages of Fear", with his brother, Jean Clouzot, who would collaborate with him on all his subsequent films under the name of Jérôme Geronimi. Production on "The Wages of Fear" lasted from 1951 to 1952. In order to gain as much independence as possible, Clouzot created his own production company called Véra Films, which he named after his wife. The sole female role in "The Wages of Fear" is played by Véra. Clouzot wrote the role specifically for his wife, as the character does not exist in the original novel. "The Wages of Fear" is about a South American town where a group of desperate men are offered money to drive trucks carrying nitroglycerin through rough terrain to put out an oil well fire. "The Wages of Fear" was the second most popular film in France in 1953 and was seen by nearly 7 million spectators. It won awards for Best Film and Best Actor (for Charles Vanel) at the Cannes Film Festival. Clouzot's next big hit was "Les Diaboliques", whose screenplay he took away from director Alfred Hitchcock. "Les Diaboliques" involves the story of a cruel headmaster who brutalizes his wife and his mistress. The two women murder him and dump his body in a swimming pool, but when the pool is drained, no corpse is found. In 1954, "Les Diaboliques" won the Louis Delluc Prize and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best foreign film. In this early and mid-1950s period, with the films "The Wages of Fear" and "Les Diaboliques", Clouzot came to be fully embraced by international critics and audiences. Both films were screened and reviewed in America as well as in France, and were rated among the best thrillers of the decade. In 1955, Clouzot directed the documentary "The Mystery of Picasso", about the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. The film follows Picasso drawing or painting 15 different works, all of which were intentionally destroyed following the film's production. Clouzot and Picasso were old acquaintances, having met when Clouzot was 14. "The Mystery of Picasso" won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but was a financial failure in France, being seen by only 37,000 filmgoers during its initial run in 1956. In 1984, the film was declared a national treasure by the government of France.