Clouzot's Le Salaire de la Peur and Friedkin's Sorcerer

Both Henri-Georges Clouzot's film (1953) and William Friedkin's 1977 re-make Sorcerer are films that are a part of their time but do not transcend it, mainly because both directors are mostly interested in manipulating the audience and have little to say, other than some reflexive nihilism and anti-Americanism.

The story in Wages of Fear and Sorcerer is the same: some desperate men are hired by American oil interests to drive trucks carrying unstable explosives (four men, two to a truck) three hundred miles on bad roads through deserts and jungles to where the explosives are needed to put out an oil fire.  Wages of Fear, a French film, is more in the nature of a black-and-white existential journey -- "yesterday we were like other people" -- while Sorcerer is more of a simple story of desperate men who need money.  Clouzot's film starts out in a crummy South American town, where the men who become drivers are trapped for (mostly) mysterious reasons, rather like characters in Sartre or Camus, whereas Friedkin gives more background to his characters, criminals and terrorists on the lam.  Friedkin is much more explicitly violent, as he was in The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) while the fear in Clouzot's film is more psychological, as in his Quai des Orfevres (1947) and Diabolique (1955). 

The differences between the two films are few but represent the times in which they were made:
In the Clouzot film one truck blows up and all we see is the explosion in the distance; it is neither shown up close nor explained.  In Friedkin's film the truck that explodes has a tire blow and the truck goes off a cliff.
In Sorcerer one trucker is killed by rebels, while in the Clouzot he dies trying to help get the truck through an oil spill.
In each film one driver survives:  in the Friedkin hit men arrive to kill the survivor, while in the Clouzot the survivor dies in an accident as he drives recklessly in a hurry to get home.

Both films are fatalistic and represent life as hopeless, the French film for philosophical reasons, the American one for practical reasons. Clouzot and Friedkin are both quite skilled in manipulating the viewer and some have compared both directors to Hitchcock.  Hitchcock was indeed a manipulator but his films have so much more, as repeated viewings reveal, about the human condition, about love and responsibility, about guilt and the transference of it and, ultimately,about sin and redemption.