Since then, I have been driven by curiosity to find all the Cruzzo movies I can find: the dark, creepy Crow, the strange-style crime film The River Crime, and of course the unforgettable Demon.

Author: Dennis Lehane

Translator: Qin Tian

Proofreading: Yi Ersan

Source: Standard Collection (April 21, 2009)

When Henry George Cruzzo 's masterpiece "The Cost of Fear " was released in the United States in 1991, I saw it for the first time.

In fact, my knowledge of this movie goes back to when I was 12 years old. I had watched the American version of "The Price of Fear" made by William Fredkin - " Thousands of Stunning ". Since then, I have been driven by curiosity to find all the Cruzzo movies I can find: the dark, creepy Crow (1943), the strange-style crime film The River Bank of Crime (1947), and of course the unforgettable Demon (1955).

"Devil" (1955)

In the process of collecting these videos, I only found a deleted version of "The Price of Fear", because when it was released in the United States, the publisher thought it had an "anti-American" color, so many years later, I insisted on watching the uncut version of this movie.

"The Price of Fear" (1953)

Even so, there is no language that can describe the shock I saw when I saw this movie. This is not only a unique film, it is the purest image of tension, but also a tricky work of art.

When you are in the theater, you will have such a terrifying experience: any inappropriate whispers of any audience around you will trigger an explosion that the characters in the movie should be careful to avoid. Just like the storyline of Cluzzo obsessed with the narrative - four men drove a tragic van full of explosives and embarked on a ill-fated journey. They not only tried to put out the fires ignited from the well 500 miles away, but also for a generous reward. They experienced hellish landforms along the way - barren land, rough gravel-covered roads and bridges that collapse at any time.

Cruzzo made a bitter irony in this movie about corporate hegemonyism, the United States' exploitation of foreign culture, the occupation of land, and people's foolishness. Critics at the time accused it of a vicious anti-American film (in 1955, Time even called it one of the most evil films of all time), and such accusations could only make viewers miss the outstanding and great artistic achievements of The Price of Fear.

As director Karel Reize pointed out in the article in "Movie Review" in 1991, this is not an "anti-American" movie, but only when it "opposes everything without selectively and fairly", its voice of resistance seems deafening.

I agree with Carrell Reizet's comments that are appropriate - Cruzzo's camera is as sharp as a lizard's eye, showing human emotions from an omniscient perspective, but Reizet's evaluation of "opposing everything" seems to be correct on the surface, but it also seems to ignore the humanistic principles adopted by Cruzzo, John Houston, Kubrick and other outstanding directors: their films have removed the subjective perspective, so the protagonist no longer has any subjective stains. Embroidered emotions do not offset empathy.

In fact, during the intense watching process, the audience is forced to show their empathy. Cruzzo leaves the gaze of the main characters coldly in the movie, leaving the audience with a fascinating, strange mix of contempt and love.

He is like a father who closes all the external emotional expressions of his children. He is worried that once tragedy comes to them, it may destroy his soul.

If so many "gloomy, fashionable" directors today are shaping their worldview in a well-equipped suburban basement looking at Nietzsche's books and listening to Trent Rezeno's music, then it should be noted that Cluzzo's pessimism did not come out of thin air.

When Germany invaded France, Cruzzo's film career had just begun. People can't help but imagine how the war had affected him. Everything around him looked so bad--the desire for killing in the genocide of the Third Reich, the morally burned-out Vichy government and the traitors everywhere.

It was in this atmosphere that Kruzzo made The Crow, which successfully angered the Nazis – yet like many other French films during the German occupation, it was filmed under the sponsorship of the Nazis.

Obviously, the Nazis were shocked by the gloomy "The Crow" and the description of the German military's behavior in the film. Similarly, the French found their representatives (those whistleblowers) offensive and believed that the film was the real colluder. After the end of World War II

, Kruzo, who was blacklisted for four years, was allowed to film. However, it is precisely because of The Crow that he succeeded in making the most "successful" mistake of an artist: he made the truth hidden in this work so disturbing that it offended everyone. All parties criticized him, but no one would support him.

"The Crow" (1943)

Since then, Cruzzo has begun to criticize the hypocrisy and hypocrisy inherent in every "decent" society in the movies, and dirty things are often hidden in the so-called morality. In "The Desire of Fear", it buzzes ruthlessly under the shining car body.

Cluzzo's long-term physical problems have troubled him, and even made it difficult for him to shoot movies for a while. In addition, his films are rejected by some French social groups who have never forgiven "The Crow". Cruzzo's depression is also inseparable from the crisis of self-identity that plagued most European countries after the war.

Cruzzo will bring a unique and ironic sense of loss in all his later films, that is, humans cannot realize their potential, which is particularly true in "The Price of Fear".

We initially entered the world of "The Price of Fear" through the opening shot of the film (Sam Pekinpa imitated the beginning of the film in 1969's "Sunset Yellow Sand"). On the withered and muddy trail in Las Piertlas, four cockroaches were tied together by a child and tortured at will. A hawker passed by, and the child immediately abandoned the cockroaches and was greedily attracted by food he could not afford. And as soon as the vendor left, the child returned to the cockroach, but a vulture had taken his place.

These details carefully set by Cruzzo at the opening point have pointed out the theme: people keep looking at things in the distance, but the attraction it creates destroys the life in front of them.

"The Cost of Fear"

People often believe that men have set clear goals for their lives, are addicted to adventure, and are eager to become a hero. But Cluzzo said no: men are roamers, adrenaline addicts, and they scoff at warm and stable things like families and fireplaces.

In this way, it is no surprise that four "heroes" appear in such a small hellish village - Las Piertras. They were not born here, and no one wanted to live here. Although we never know what drove them here, we know that this must be a particularly unforgivable sin, because no one would choose to live in hell, and these four people had long found a reason to regret and longed to escape from this place.

The four people are Mario (Yves Mondang), Joe (Char Van Al), Luigi (Folco Luli) and Bimba (Peter Van Ek). In the lens of Cluzzo, they are useless by the poverty and hopeless torture brought to them by the village.

These four people were employed by Southern Oil Company, a ruthless American multinational company whose greed has destroyed the village and Central and South America. O'Brien (William Tubbs), the company's representative, hired the man to perform a suicide mission and promised to return a generous reward to everyone, although he believed that at most only two people would survive.

For colleagues who oppose hiring "homemen" to do the job, O'Brien retorted, "The wanks don't have any unions and no families." And when he learned that the Safety Committee was coming to investigate the fire, he replied, "Put all the responsibility on the victims, so they're done."

However, just as the audience felt Cruzzo's ruthless anger at the Western company (a character mocked the Americans in the village: "Where there is oil, there is them."), people can also feel his anger and despair towards those willing to sacrifice their lives for such a meaningless task.

The four are a very unlovable protagonist. He treats his lover Linda (Cruzzo’s wife Vera plays the sexy character), and in the first scene he literally caresses her head as she crawls towards him.

It must be said that Linda is a willing accomplice. She was totally Mario's sexual beggar, and no matter how her efforts were repeatedly degraded, she lay on the ground with her eyes closed, waiting for her lover to come back when people saw her last.

However, Mario's disgust for herself made him unable to see Linda - the only beauty in her life. She knelt in front of him, as Linda said, willingly robbed and killed him. Mario so flatly rejects this, as others have pointed out, which tactfully suggests the repressed homosexual relationship between him and Joe, where Cluzzo shows people’s pursuit of more doubtful goals.

others are also portrayed as cruel and ruthless. Joe, a stalker with a high head and humble tyrant, attracted or excluded those around him with his cruel character, but later, he found himself the weakest of all.

Bimba looks like an Aryan man in Hitler 's mouth is tall and hard as iron. His fate is so tense that he expects his death before he even drives.

And Luigi, on the surface, is the most humane person in the four, at best a noble fool, because even if he survived a long journey, he was likely to die of pneumoconiosis, and during his time at Southern Oil Company, he was exposed to cement every day.

One hour after the movie began, they finally embarked on this desperate journey. The rest of the film made people feel breathless and terrified. Every step the actors took, the audience was worried about them. As Joe said, "Everyone has explosives tied to it."

The road is sometimes bumpy and sometimes smooth, so that the only way to reduce danger is to gradually move forward in less than 6 miles per hour or more than 40 miles per hour. When they encounter a cramped bend on the cliff, they must retreat to a rotten plank, which is all their hope of life. They had to blow up a 50-ton boulder on the road with explosives to get to a safe place.

In fact, this journey is the threshold to enter the suspense created by Cluzzo and Hitchcock . As a novelist, I learned something from these two masters: this tension does not come from any gimmicks or fear, but exists in any hint of a terrible result. If this tension is presented in the form of a disaster film, it will only make the film fall into a stalemate.

After the four of them broke the rock, they drove past an oil pool. The cruel Mario didn't want the car to be trapped here, so he deliberately drove to break Qiao's leg, but they still fell into the oil pool. With each crisis elimination, the four of them also gained more "the price of fear".

exposed to horror will never reduce people's fear, and the fear will only increase as most hero movies show. You can't overcome your fear, you can only escape it for the time being. So the four people knew very well that every time the danger came, the god of death blinked, and the journey would eventually end with death.

One of the characters said before they died, "There is nothing here!" This will definitely make the world-weariness and atheism displayed in "The Price of Fear" come under fire, but I think Cruzzo never thought "this is a world of nothingness", but "this is the world of nothingness we create." (In despair of the future of mankind, condemning what humans do is abnormally full of hope.)

After all, it is we who helped Cruzzo create such a world where people take all risks for their simple needs and are willing to lose everything, because it confirms that their self-defeated "fate" can destroy everything, because everything can be destroyed. These people can't help but create a sense of desolate tragedy: children torture cockroaches to pass the time while waiting for vendors to peddlers to sell food they can never afford.