‘The Wages of Fear’ (NR)

When "The Wages of Fear" opened in New York in 1955, the French suspense thriller was 20 percent shorter than director Henri-Georges Clouzot's original. Distributors concerned about fragile sensibilities had snipped out the bits about suppressed homosexuality and the greedy American oil interests. The classic recently has been restored to its full length -- good news for those who wish to wallow unexpurgated in existential dread.

The black-and-white adventure is set in Las Piedras, a grungy Latin American oil town under the thumb of the chief employer, the Southern Oil Co. (Actually it's the Camargue, and it looks like it too.) A colorful bunch of European drifters and indigenous peoples hang about swatting flies. They're at loggerheads with one another because it is hot and they are unemployed. The Americans keep the jobs and the money to themselves, the slang-talking pigs.

Then one day fire breaks out at an oil field 300 miles away, and non-union truckers are needed to transport liquid nitroglycerin to the site with plans of fighting fire with fire. There is no lack of volunteers, but only four of the hardiest antiheroes are chosen to drive trucks without suspension carefully down the rutted mud roads. At every turn, it seems there's some catastrophe to test the adventurers' courage. There are rocks to blow up, curves to negotiate, puddles to ford and so on. This part of the story suffered little from the snipping and was nonetheless highly regarded.

Most of the restored footage turns up in the first hour of the tale, which is devoted to establishing the antiheroes and exploring the listlessness of their fly-bitten, disease-riddled environment. A quartet that might have walked out of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," they are a swaggering young Frenchman (Yves Montand), an old Parisian con artist (Charles Vanel), an Italian with lung disease (Folco Lulli) and a steely German pilot (Peter van Eyck). They acquit themselves with varying degrees of manliness, but it just doesn't matter what they do in the end.

A precursor of "The Wild Bunch," it is an expertly directed, personally felt film. You may enjoy "The Wages of Fear," but you'll pay for it.

"The Wages of Fear" is in French with subtitles.