Greed in the Sun (1964)

Original title: Cent mille dollars au soleil

Buddies Marec (Lino Ventura) and Rocco (Jean-Paul Belmondo) are driving trucks through the Sahara for the company of the somewhat shady Castigliano (Gert Fröbe). One day, Rocco and his new girlfriend Pepa (Andréa Parisy) abscond with a loaded truck that was meant to be driven by a newbie with a clearly shady past calling himself Steiner (Reginald Kernan). We will learn quickly enough that a contact of Pepa’s has promised to pay a hundred thousand dollars for the truck’s supposed cement load, delivery somewhere half across North Africa.

Offered quite a bit of money (though certainly not as much as Rocco) by Castigliano, Marec agrees to get the cargo back. It’s not just about the money, clearly – Marec seems mostly pissed that his best friend has broken their bro contract, or whatever the early 60s French manly man thing is called. Together with the disgruntled Steiner (who lost his job on account of Rocco’s stunt), he goes in pursuit. Obviously, things are not going to be easy for any of these men.

When one thinks of adventure films about truck drivers in a post-colonial world made by filmmakers who haven’t quite gotten out of the colonial mindset, the first movie that comes to mind is always going to be Clouzot’s utterly brilliant Wages of Fear. That comparison is a bit of a problem for a scrappy little (okay, actually at the time highly successful in its native France) movie like this one as directed by Henri Verneuil. Not because it is a bad film, but because it can’t help but look so much worse in comparison to the genre defining film at least I couldn’t quite keep out of my mind completely during its running time.

Though, really, apart from the trucks and the post-colonial setting (and even that is a completely different post-colonial setting, or at least continent, here), the film’s aren’t actually terribly close in tone and style. Verneuil’s film isn’t really interested in desperate existentialism; in fact, it’s a buddy movie that keeps its buddies apart for most of the running time, and then puts them in the sort of competing position that’d end in blood and tears in noirs and westerns.

Verneuil doesn’t seem interested in blood and tears, either, and goes for a curiously limp punch-up/reconciliation scene that ends the plot on a note that’s too light to really work for me because it turns the struggle of the two hours that came before into a bit of a pointless lark in place of something that could really change its characters in any important way.

The film does like to meander tonally quite a bit anyway. But then, it meanders in most regards, and really could have lost about twenty minutes or so of runtime without losing much apart from a dozen of about a hundred moments of casual misogyny (there’s not a single woman in the damn thing that isn’t called a “slut” by characters we are supposed to sympathize with).

However, there’s a lot to like here, too: Ventura, as so often, has this great exhausted working class tough guy presence suggesting a guy who has survived a lot of things by a mixture of grit and luck but lost everything else he ever laid his hands on; while Belmondo is pretty perfect as the kind of charming asshole who would come up with a stupid stunt like the one he pulls in the movie and be forgiven by the actual grown-ups. When the film is not meandering, so particularly in its second half, there are some fine action sequences here, like the race along a mountain road, and quite a lot of nicely realized scenes of people pulling one over each other while smiling.

That these good elements don’t quite come together to make Greed in the Sun great isn’t so terrible, because on the other hand, its weaknesses don’t ruin it, so at the very least, it’s still worth watching after fifty years or so.