Henri-Georges Clouzot's masterwork starts out like an Italian Neo-Realist film set in a poor South American village. After a tapestry of desperate characters is established, suddenly the movie turns into an action suspense thriller, in which four characters must transport two trucks full of nitroglycerine across rough territory to the site of a remote oil field where a fire has broken out. The tension winds tight as the story bounds from one set piece to another. Clouzot demonstrates a mastery at the action adventure genre as surely as he would the thriller genre with Diabolique two years later.