The Wages of Fear: it's 2½ hours long, and the first hour is a poorly acted setup for the real film. From there it truly begins. I did love it, but I had to knuckle through the first part due to the stylized acting. This is from 1953, and this definitely had not been influenced by method acting.
But taken as a whole, the film was very cool, creative, and unique. The actors started really to shine as the film progressed, and that struck a nice chord with me, because I do like films that progress slowly, and really let you sit with characters long enough to see them develop, actually to change and evolve / devolve from the plot. That is what happened here.
It does not begin to approach the brutality of the Friedkin remake, and Friedkin executed a great idea to make the backstory of each character's predicament the beginning of his film, but Friedkin really did just want to crush your spirit with his film, whereas the original was filled with life and character.
My wife, who often has the best insight, said that elements of the original and the remake could be combined to make a stronger film than either on its own.
The version of The Wages of Fear I saw was what is streaming on The Criterion Channel, and it was a restored version including many scenes that had been censored from the original US release, due to whacked out perception of anti-American sentiment, homosexuality, racism, and worker exploitation. These scenes helped flush out the film greatly, especially those underlining the nakedly exploitative attitude of the company.
I'm still processing both films, but I'm happy to have seen them back to back. The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer are each strong in its own way. Sorcerer offered me the reflection that perhaps Friedkin was a big influence on Michael Cimino, that Friedkin was maybe the first true master of soul destroying brutality, and that Cimino carried and refined that mantel, before he started making utter shit like Desperate Hours later on.
Now that I think of it, Cimino and Friedkin are wildly varied in the quality of their films, on a more extreme level than I'm aware of in anyone else's body of work. On one hand you have The Deer Hunter and The Exorcist, and on the other you have Desperate Hours and Rampage. Hmmm...
From what I've gleaned, Cimino just lost his mind with the freedom he was given after The Deer Hunter, and squandered untold money for Heaven's Gate, killing his hopeful career, but Friedkin was just a raging dick, dubbed Hurricane Billy for his mercurial egomania. He had this disgusting tendency to blame any lack of financial return on his films on the actors he hired, as if the point of directing a film is not to guide the actors to great performances.
It's like both of these guys have that Shakespearean style inherent flaw that is the fundamental to their diminishment.
Next were going to try Becket, which I haven't seen since high school. Very excited for this one.