Sorcerer (1977)
Directed by William Friedkin
Four men from different parts of the globe, all hiding from their pasts in the same remote South American town, agree to risk their lives transporting several cases of dynamite (which is so old that it is dripping unstable nitroglycerin) across dangerous jungle terrain.
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11 films that influenced Sorcerer
What critics say influenced Sorcerer
Like many other American films of the 1970s, there's also a degree of film literacy and nostalgia, with nods not only to the original The Wages of Fear, but also to John Huston's 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Comparisons to “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” make sense in terms of the character dynamics, but it’s hard to see any of these characters as admirable anti-heroes.
But Scheider is extraordinary as a man whose desperation eventually turns to mania; there’s more than a shade of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre’s Fred C. Dobbs in the way he screams “We’re sitting on double shares!” when he thinks the other truck has gotten permanently detoured.
William Friedkin’s follow-up to The Exorcist was Sorcerer, an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear, which also inspired Henri-George Clouzot’s film of the same name.
The plot of William Friedkin's suspense thriller originated with the same Georges Arnaud novel that inspired Henri-Georges Clouzot's French suspense classic The Wages of Fear (1953).
It's based on the George Arnaud novel "The Wages of Fear" -- the same novel that inspired Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film of the same name -- and everything else about the story is really only details in service of the chief plot development: All four main characters, in need of precious pesos to help them complete their transformed identities, are hired to drive two trucks laden with nitroglycerin over a mountain range, through a jungle and to the site of an oil-well-turned-inferno.
Sorcerer is, after all, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear , though credited in the film as an adaptation of Georges Arnaud's novel.
There’s a moment in the interview with William Friedkin which forms this Blu-ray disc’s only extra in which he insists that Sorcerer is not a remake of The Wages of Fear , the award-winning and highly praised drama directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1953.
Friedkin finds these themes amid radical set pieces; a 10-minute struggle to get a truck over a bridge during an intense thunderstorm constitutes some of the finest sound mixing in Hollywood, perhaps cinematic history, rivaling the battle on the ice in Alexander Nevsky .
The brute struggle against implacable fate finds its most literal, and most thrilling, expression in the sequence where Scheider and Rabal maneuver their truck across an unravelling rope bridge stretched over a swollen river—a miniature masterpiece of escalating tension and practical special effects whose only rival may be the locomotive gag in Buster Keaton’s The General.
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Sorcerer, as with Werner Herzog’s (excellent!) similar jungle romps Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcaraldo , is an intelligent thriller—beyond the usual Hollywood action tripe—that ponders the questions of man’s control over his own fate and the absurd situations one can find themselves cast as result of their poor life choices.
They come to work together when they find mutual employment transporting cargoes of unstable, aged stocks of “nitroglycerin sweating” dynamite across a treacherous South American jungle (see Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcaraldo ).
Like its timeline and scope peer, Apocalypse Now or Aguirre, The Wrath Of God , Sorcerer works on all cylinders.
He’s clearly influenced by the European political thrillers of Costa-Gavras, but there are also elements of the verité style of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), and even bits of Alfred Hitchcock in his globetrotting mode.
One needs only to listen to Friedkin’s superb analysis of The Leopard Man on the DVD commentary track of Warner Home Video’s legendary box set, The Val Lewton Collection, to find corroboration of this influence (in addition to Friedkin’s early beginnings in news, public affairs and documentary).
Friedkin’s version starts in the same dispersed global space as The French Connection and The Exorcist, and devotes its first half to a motley crew of criminals whose paths eventually converge in South America – Jackie, played by Roy Scheider, Serrano, played by Bruno Cremer, Nilo, played by Francisco Rabal, and Kassem, played by Amidou.
In 1971 he directed the Oscar winning The French Connection , a film which combined the artificiality of narrative cinema with a documentary style that resulted in a heightened sense of reality and immediacy.
The French Connection, for all its borrowings from Pontecorvo and Costa-Gavras, remains Friedkin’s best film, because in it he made no pretense of getting close to his characters, but kept his concern always with plot.
Friedkin was at the top of his game after directing The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), and his remake (a term he steadfastly refuses to use), which would come to be known as Sorcerer , is an inspired film, one that astounds and frightens in equal measures.
After winning a shelfload of Oscars for 1971’s The French Connection and spinning heads with his follow-up, The Exorcist, director William Friedkin could do as he pleased.
The definitive case study might be William Friedkin, who with THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) and THE EXORCIST (1973) became the New Hollywood’s most daring pulp-realist provocateur.
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Few towns have been depicted on the screen with such loving, aestheticized squalor as Porvenir; it makes the Devil’s Island accommodations in “Papillon” look like Club Med.
William Friedkin’s follow-up to The Exorcist was Sorcerer, an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear, which also inspired Henri-George Clouzot’s film of the same name.
Friedkin was at the top of his game after directing The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), and his remake (a term he steadfastly refuses to use), which would come to be known as Sorcerer , is an inspired film, one that astounds and frightens in equal measures.
After winning a shelfload of Oscars for 1971’s The French Connection and spinning heads with his follow-up, The Exorcist, director William Friedkin could do as he pleased.
The definitive case study might be William Friedkin, who with THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) and THE EXORCIST (1973) became the New Hollywood’s most daring pulp-realist provocateur.
While William Friedkin’s instant classics The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) raked in the cash and the critical raves, Sorcerer gained mixed to negative reviews on the worldwide critical front.
Having invested years into his first film following The Exorcist , William Friedkin directs with supreme confidence.