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Netflix has announced a remake of the 1950s French classic The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur), in a production reuniting the platform with action-thriller maestro Julien Leclercq.

Production is currently underway on the untitled film for a scheduled release in 2024.

The 1953 original starred Yves Montand, Peter van Eyck, Charles Vanel and Folco Lulli as four down-on-their-luck men who are hired to drive trucks laden with nitroglycerine through the mountains as part of an operation to extinguish an oil well fire.

The work is regarded as one of the most suspenseful action-thrillers of all time.

Leclercq’s reboot stars Franck Gastambide, best known internationally for his role in Taxi 5, opposite Alban Lenoir (Lost Bullet), Ana Girardot (The House) and Sofiane Zermani (No Limit).

“To reunite this cast for the reboot of such a film, for a worldwide broadcast with Netflix, forces me to put all my heart and guts into it,...

Review by Roger Carpenter

Italian directors have always had a penchant for jumping on the cinematic bandwagon whenever a popular film is released. And we aren’t talking about just a couple of directors and a couple of films, but nearly all directors and, depending upon the genre, sometimes hundreds of films. Thus, we have the pepla of the 1950’s and 1960’s, the poliziotteschi and gialli of the 1970’s, the spaghetti westerns of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Jaws-inspired rip-offs, the Alien-inspired ripoffs, and the zombie and jungle/cannibal epics of the 1980’s. But, with the international sensation of the Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis vehicle entitled The Vikings in 1958, Italians were quick to jump on this particular bandwagon as well, resulting in a seven-year cycle of Viking films. And Mario Bava, best known for his proto-slashers and horror vehicles, was not averse to climbing on the bandwagon occasionally himself.

“And On The Eighth Day Bava Created Color.” That’s my sentiment with every new quality restoration of a Mario Bava picture. This amazing new disc of Il Maestro’s teeth-clenched Viking epic delivers stunning action scenes and eye-bending widescreen fantasy visuals. Arrow’s Blu-ray is spiked with a new Tim Lucas commentary.

Erik the Conqueror

Blu-ray + DVD

Arrow Video USA

1961 / Color / 2:35 widescreen (Dyaliscope) / 90 min. / Street Date August 29, 2017 / Available from Arrow Video / 39.95

Starring: Cameron Mitchell, Alice & Ellen Kessler, George Ardisson, Andrea Checchi, Françoise Christophe, Raf Baldassarre, Joe Robinson, Folco Lulli.

Cinematography: Mario Bava, Ubaldo Terzano

Film Editor: Mario Serandrei

Original Music: Roberto Nicolosi

Written by Oreste Biancoli, Mario Bava

Produced by Ferruccio De Martino

Directed by Mario Bava

Far too good to be slammed as a mere imitation of Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings, Mario Bava’s exciting Erik the Conqueror is one of the best of the Italian-made...

Yippee-ki-yay! It's action-movie time! From Die Hard to Deliverance, here's what the Guardian and Observer's critics think are the 10 best ever made. Let us know what you think in the comments below

• Top 10 romantic movies

Peter Bradshaw on action movies

In some ways, it should be the quintessential cinema genre. After all, what does the director shout at the beginning of a take? Action – at times a euphemism for violence and machismo – evolved into a recognisable genre in the 80s. Gunplay and athleticism resurfaced in a sweatier and more explicitly violent form, with movies such as Sylvester Stallone's First Blood. The hardware was all-important, and the metallic sheen of the guns was something to be savoured alongside the musculature of the heroes. The genre spawned the action hero. These were not pretty-boys there to melt female hearts: they were there to get a roar of approval from the guys.

Clouzot and Romy Schneider on the set of L'Enfer

"Watching a film by the French master Henri-Georges Clouzot, you often feel as if the walls were closing in on you — even when there are no walls," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "The Wages of Fear (1953), the movie that opens the Museum of Modern Art's Clouzot retrospective [today], takes place almost entirely out of doors, yet it's as claustrophobic as a stretch in solitary confinement…. It is perhaps fortunate, for the sanity of his viewers, that he managed to complete only 11 features between 1942, when his deceptively light-hearted L'Assassin Habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at No. 21) was released, and 1968, when his last movie, La Prisonnière, came out.... All 11 will be screened before the series ends on Dec 24, along with odds and ends like a couple of early-40s pictures for which he supplied screenplays and a 2010 documentary, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno,...

by Vadim Rizov

The well known numbers fueling Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, which soon screens in a new 35mm print at NYC's Film Forum: 148 minutes, two trucks, three hundred miles, four men, lots of nitroglycerin. An oil fire's raging at a far-away outpost, and the Southern Oil Company (which, as Roger Ebert noted, non-coincidentally has the same initials as Standard Oil) needs explosives to put it out; with roads in this unnamed South American oil republic so unstable the slightest jostle will blow up the truck, it'll take some truly desperate losers to undertake the trip—men like Mario (Yves Montand) and Luigi (Folco Lulli). (It's unknown if Nintendo named their video-game duo in deliberate homage.) The former best friends have their relationship torn apart at the film's start by the arrival in town of barrel-chested Jo (Charles Vanel), who wears his gut as an emblem of...

Orson Welles, Ruth Warrick, Citizen Kane Orson Welles on TCM: The Third Man, The Lady From Shanghai Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am The Tartars (1961) A barbarian army attacks Viking settlements along the Russian steppes. Dir: Richard Thorpe. Cast: Victor Mature, Orson Welles, Folco Lulli. C-83 mins, Letterbox Format 7:30 Am Tomorrow Is Forever (1946) A scarred veteran presumed dead returns home to find his wife remarried. Dir: Irving Pichel. Cast: Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, George Brent. Bw-104 mins. 9:30 Am Moby Dick (1956) Epic adaptation of Herman Melville's classic about a vengeful sea captain out to catch the whale that maimed him. Dir: John Huston. Cast: Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, Leo Genn. C-115 mins, Letterbox Format 11:30 Am The V.I.P.S (1963) Wealthy passengers fogged in at London's Heathrow Airport fight to survive a variety of personal trials. Dir: Anthony Asquith. Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jourdan.

Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953

When Henri-Georges Clouzot took on a genre, it generally led to a classic: so Les Diaboliques is one of the most frightening pictures ever put on screen; The Mystery of Picasso is among the most outstanding films exploring the work of an artist; and The Wages of Fear has no superior in the field of action-suspense. Set in an unnamed south American country, the action starts in a small town with an airfield where we are introduced to four shady characters anxious to get out, but minus the money for a plane ticket. A very venal oil company offers them $2,000 each to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerine over rough mountain roads to an oilfield that is on fire. The roads are awful. The hazards are unlimited. And the nitro, sweating in the heat, itches to explode long before it gets to the oilfield.

The way Clouzot films this...

Chicago – The Criterion Collection continues their brilliant Blu-Ray release pattern this week in which they induct a new film into the collection (“In the Realm of the Senses,” which will be reviewed separately) and bring one of their most beloved titles on to the next-gen format on the same street date. The classic this week is the amazing and timeless “The Wages of Fear,” better than ever in HD.

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0 “The Wages of Fear” is about a group of men caught in a desperate, isolated situation in a small South American town. From all over the world, these people are literally stuck. They can’t afford the plane ticket to leave and don’t really have anywhere to go if they could. They are lost souls.

The Wages of Fear was released on Blu-Ray on April 21st, 2009.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

On the outskirts of this small town,...