There were two remakes of The Wages of Fear that I know of. One was Sorcerer (1977), directed by William Friedkin who died August 7th at age 87. The other was an episode of Little House on the Prairie (season 2, episode 18) where Michael Landon gets a job transporting a wagon load of nitroglycerin after the crops fail.
A U.S. oil company in South America will pay four men $2,000 each (over $20,000 today) to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerin over 300 miles of bad road to put out a burning oil well.
Filmed in the South of France. If they named the country it was set in, I missed it. Much of it took place in an impoverished village where the oil company is the main employer. Foreign workers are trapped, unable to make money to pay their way home.
The driving part didn't seem as nightmarish as I thought it would. Some guys were more careful than others.
The movie looked beautiful, in black and white. I was surprised by some shots of the men in their trucks in front of a rear screen projection.
Saw the restored, two a half hour version on the Criterion channel. They got to the truck driving part about an hour into it. Reportedly, there's a 2 hour 11 minute version.
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