Kill James Bond! - S4E32.5 The Wages of Fear

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

This is a preview of a bonus episode! find the rest of it along with out half-decade backlog of bonus episodes, here! KJB Reenters the Cerebral French zone, so you know it's a November bonus pick. This week, we check out a 1953 film about european cast-offs risking their lives in a remote south american oil and mining community. ----- Check out friend of the show Mattie's new book Simplicity here, or wherever fine graphic novels are sold! ----- FREE PALESTINE - With the ceasefire in full effect, the media has returned to ignoring the daily atrocities in Gaza. My friend Ahmed still needs to feed his family and afford medicine. Anything you can kick in would be hugely appreciated. https://chuffed.org/project/150817-please-help-ahmed-and-his-family-get-food-drink-and-medicine And these are some more general links you can support collective efforts with! -The Palestinian Communist Youth Union is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ ----- Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the everything app account

And welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello. Cowabunga. Hi. Hello. It's November.

And I once again seized the opportunity with both hands to make my friends watch and talk about a black and white French existentialist film. That's right. I hope you. I don't enjoy suffering. I hope you enjoy philosophy. I don't know why either of you too, enjoy philosophy, but you know, just in case.

No, me neither. I hate that. I love tubes, though. I love tubes. I've never thought in my life. She just philosophizes all those tubes. No, we watched The Wages of Fear, which is a 1953 movie

that is, I think, just, Just masterful exercise in cinematic tension. You might also know it from, there was a loose remake of it in the 70s called Sorcerer, which I will also probably be doing because I think the thing is, I was inspired by the Fast and the Furious, of course, the truckers, the truckers who are, of course, the natural enemy of the carmen, the truckman. And this made me think, I want a movie that has some truck in it. And I'd even like to suggest, you know, now that we've, we've, I would say we've ticked off all the religions, you know, Christianity. Yes. Different kind of Christianity.

Sorting. Sordid. Well, exactly, right? I think maybe now is the time for truck season, you know? If the movie has a truck in it, maybe that's in our bailiwick. This movie isn't so much the Fast and the Furious as it is like the slow and mild. It's a movie about driving slowly but still very tense. The slow and the anxious, I would say.

Yes, yes, yes. The exact opposite of Fast and Furious. Can I come out here? I had such a wonderful time with this movie. We're going to discuss the entirety of the movie The Wages of Fear, 1953. I imagine you, the listener. If you haven't watched this, you haven't had it spoiled for you yet. Maybe watch the Wages of Fear in 1953 before listening to this.

I would say so. I had a good time. It's a long movie, but like the French is the thing. Yeah, absolutely. I was distracted at parts and a bit bored in places, but... I'm uncultured and a swine and also doing a million, bazillion other things right now, so I wasn't really in a good mindset to sit and absorb it. No, it's fine.

Yeah, it took me three sittings actually to finish this off, because I've also been very busy, but I still loved it, and it was a masterpiece. It's a long movie. Like, I'm gonna make us watch long. and longer movies and they're going to get more and more difficult to watch. We're going to end up watching castration movie. It's true. I'm going to make us watch logistics eventually.

Yeah, no, I'd love to see that actually. Actually would like... We begin in the dirt with some insects fighting. Sorry, no, we don't. We begin with a logo that says TF1 Studio, the Trash Feature Studio. Trash Future, maybe... That's true. We should have said that up top.

Trash Future did make this movie. That's part of why we're doing it. But yeah, yeah. largely a Hussein joint, yes. In 1953, yes. Then we begin with cockroaches. Cockroaches fighting in the dirt while a kid like sort of

pokes them with a stick. I wonder if that says anything about the movie. Probably not. Yeah, several bugs tied together pulling each, trying to split apart and pulling each other. I wonder if there's some sort of symbolic meaning here. The first shot of a film doesn't mean anything. As flies to wanton

boys, are we to the gods? They kill us for their sport. or something. The first shot of a film is a freebie. It's, yeah, you put that in there so that the audience, you know, they're coming in late and they're sitting down and taking their coats off, right? That doesn't mean anything. Real kind of like Netflix screenwriting.

So like, my friends and I watched the Netflix vehicle, The Rip recently, which the dealers Matt Damon, no, Matt Damon sort of said, like in the sort of press round for this, oh yeah, they made us sort of rewrite it so that everything that happens gets described three times by a character so that if you're on your phone, you don't need to look up to follow the movie. Great. And the thing is, you're not prepared for the number of times they say the word the rip in the rip. It's really a, it's a very rip-focused movie. This is kind of the opposite of that. Yeah, this movie cleverly gets around designing for the two-screen experience by having it be

in foreign, which I don't speak. So I had to read the subtitles. Incredibly foreign, not just French, but French, Spanish, Italian. It's so good. French, Spanish, Italian are some German, English, and they swing between them freely as someone who speaks all of a language as would. It's really good. It's very cool, actually, I like it. We are in this dirt poor, quite literally, and there's a lot of dirt and everyone's poor,

town in South America, although we don't actually explicitly say that. And as this kid is like sort of torturing, some insects, like an American motorcycle and Jeep just kind of like blast through this town, which is sort of like dirt roads, adobe buildings. It's like obviously visibly like boiling hot. And in the shade at the nearby bar, we see a bunch of white guys who are just like sweating. One of whom is throwing rocks at a dog. Yes.

Yeah, just kind of like Pointless Cruelty Because there's nothing else to do Except indulge in pointless cruelty Yeah, it's hitting some of the same notes as the film Queer in the sense of your kind of washed up something below Expat, something between Expat and Sex Tourist

kind of like horrible white boy in poor country vibes And there's just like a half dozen of these guys who are all sitting around with nothing thing to do because they have no jobs. And the owner of the bar is like, oh, is it one lemonade for six people again? Because they're all broke. Really good.

One of them, Mario, has a bit of a flirtation ship with a 10 out of 10 smoke show who scrubs the floor, first of all, and then, like, crawls over and gets pet like a cat and might say hello. Yeah, this is Linda. Linda is, I didn't go cat, I described it as puppy girl moding right out of the gates, But either way, similar thing of like, you know, animalistic and sort of debasing. And so, yeah, she's like also like sort of, yeah, it's like very dependent, right? It's very like attention seeking.

There's like, there's a great bit that I think really captures this, which is one of the guys, not the guy who was stoning the dog. I think it's the doctor. rocks forward on his chair and like spits on the floor missing the already disgusting spittoon in order to provoke the bartender who is too hot to even fight him about it. Yeah, this bartender doesn't like them being there. And he's also shagging Linda just to kind of like rub it in Mario's face basically. He threatens her with a whip too, which I'm not a big fan of, but the lads basically intervene

in this and get thrown out. It's sort of like coercive, yeah. It's also like there is a bit of sort of like, you know, park or universe. This is the town where white boys are oppressed, right? Because like everybody else is like Hispanic or like Afro-Hispanic, including the bartender, right? Except for these white boys and Linda. And like even like when he kicks them out for not being citizens and not having jobs and not buying like any drinks, I think one of them sort of sarcastically calls him a credit to the white race.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what was that about? The deal is just authentically that, like, they do not belong here, right? They have got here by sort of, like, accident or circumstance and are now sort of, like, embarrassing tramps, right? It's the town where there's woke still. You have white males. Can't get a job. Can't go.

Exactly. Exactly. And then a plane comes in low. like a Dakota, like an old cargo plane comes in. And it's like the plane that brings all of the mail because we are remote here as well. Yeah, this is the only way in and out of town, basically, is this one extra.

And then two guys drive to get the mail from the plane. One of them is like me. He's locked in on like, I have a visa. I want to go to the United States. Like, they've got to let me go. They've got to let me in. He's like, I've got to let me... Yeah, yeah, it's right.

It's real. Yeah, so, buddy. You flashed that at everyone in town. You've got to stop, ma. Yeah, it's like, everyone is trying to get out. By the way, as the plane comes over, we see that the bartender is, like, coercing Linda, who's sort of, like, is sort of, like, you know,

muse about this upstairs for sex. And Mario, who is, like, has been, like, finagling her to, like, shoplift a pack of cigarettes for him. He can't afford. It's just, like, completely blasé about this. Mm-hmm. He's very sort of like easy come, easy go about this prospect of this woman being, again, like sort of coercively sexually abused by another man. She's much more into him than he is into her, really.

Definitely. Yes, yeah. All right, you know the drill. If you want to hear the rest of this episode of Kill James Bond, you're going to have to hail over to our Patreon. And that's patreon.com slash kill James Bond, all one word. And sign up today for as little as five pounds a month to get access to both this episode. the next bonus episode this month and our entire backlog of nearly five full years of bonus episodes. And you can get all of that for just five pounds a month.

Come on. Come on, what a deal. What a fucking scoop.