LETTERS : Two endings

QUENTIN Curtis's assertion ("How I learnt to love the bomb", 1 January) that "there is no closing conflagration" in The Wages of Fear is open to challenge. I have seen two quite different endings to Clouzot's classic. In one the victorious lorrymen hum and smile as they return from the oil-well fire having at last unloaded their deadly nitroglycerine cargo. The second shows them similarly triumphant but then rolling their vehicle into a deep gorge and thus oblivion. Probably the latter's explosive ironywas too downbeat for the money people ever fearful of their "wages".

Geoffrey Bull Todwick, Sheffield