Directed by William Friedkin (1977)
This existential thriller, about four outcasts hauling a volatile load of dynamite, bombed at the box office. Critics and audiences found the title misleading. They expected a tie-in to Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Others thought it was a foreign flick, repelled by the subtitles, the international cast, and locations. We’re talking popcorn eaters who don’t like having to read their action flicks. There were walk outs … to a galaxy far, far away.
Sci-fi fantasy had just had its big bang. People were lining up to see Star Wars (1977) for the seventh or eighth time. No one wanted to see a movie about bad guys on a suicide mission in South America. The Sam Peckinpah era of cigar-chomping anti-heroes was having a cardiac arrest. Sorcerer arrived dead on arrival. The film was canned for the mausoleum.
Warp speed decades later.
Star Wars has metastasized into a franchise with so many sequels and spinoffs you’d have to devote seven lives to endure it all, with baby Yoda as your guide.
But Sorcerer stands alone, exhumed from the film mausoleum, restored in 4K, one gem of a flick, undiluted by sequels, prequels, spinoffs, or a cutesy baby sorcerer, all goo-goo gaga with a toy stick of dynamite in hand. Now, to be fair, Sorcerer does have a predecessor, equally riveting.
Sorcerer is a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), based on the novel by Georges Arnaud (1950). Clouzot’s film is in arid black-and-white. Sorcerer is in grimy color with a 70s orange flair, moonlit blues, and deep jungle greens.
The soundtrack is diabolical, creepy synth by Tangerine Dream, sure to give you goose flesh whenever it kicks in. You want to freak yourself out, listen to Edgar Froese channel the dark side on his synth (YouTube – Prophet V Sobornost).
With the eerie soundtrack and freaky title, it’s easy to see how Exorcist fans might’ve thought there was more projectile pea soup and blathering demon speak on the way.
But the evil here is the evil men do. Sorcerer presents us with a mix of criminals: a hit man, a terrorist, an embezzler, and a get-away heist driver. Each is their own desperado, fleeing from varied parts of the world: Vera Cruz, Jerusalem, Paris, and Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Then there’s Porvenir, South America. It’s a shanty village with a ramshackle bar, muddy roads, and a dirt air strip occasioned by one clunker of a plane. This is where criminals come hideout on a shoe-string budget. There’s a drinking wage to be made, helping an American oil company install a pipe line. It’s deadly work, with zero health insurance. Local mercenaries bomb an oil well. A full-throated fire spews from the earth, taller than any mountain, a pillar of flames crowned with roiling black clouds.
We approach the fire in a Herzogian helicopter ride that captures that documentary feel of witnessing an abomination created by corporate exploitation. That’s the real evil in this flick and the one that endures!
The only way to put out the fire is to blow it out with dynamite. The closest available dynamite is a two-hundred plus mile drive away from the oil fire. A helicopter won’t transport the dynamite. It’s too volatile.
Time to meet our A-Team. Four destitute criminals, they ask for more money once they realize there are two trucks for a job requiring only one. Then they embark on their suicide mission loaded with dynamite into the jungle, where one bump on the road too hard. It’s over!
Friedkin said this about the title, “A sorcerer is an evil wizard and in this case the evil wizard is fate.”
And there are several fates at work here. The fate of the characters, the short-term and long-term fate of the film itself, and the fate of William Friedkin as a Hollywood director.
This was during a time when Francis Ford Coppola was wrestling his own demons to finish Apocalypse Now (1979). Years later, Werner Herzog would venture to make his most logistically challenging film, Fitzcarraldo (1982), followed by a Les Blank documentary accounting for its labor-intensive production, Burden of Dreams (1982). These are the films of legend, films that directors almost died or went insane to get on the silver screen. Sorcerer was that for Friedkin.
It’s fair to say he made this film with one of those crates of volatile dynamite strapped to his back. The real sorcery here is Friedkin’s bull-headed determination to make this film, overcoming stubborn producers, a series of financial setbacks, logistical compromises, casting issues, and probably one hell of an ulcer.
Friedkin had originally wanted Steve McQueen to play the part of Jackie Scanlon, the New Jersey heist/get away driver with a hit on his head after robbing bingo winnings from a Catholic Church. When McQueen fell through, Friedkin queried six, seven other actors before he settled on Roy Sheider. One of them was Warren Oates, a runt Steve McQueen with a viperous grin.
Warren Oates as Jackie Scanlon would have made for a whole other Sorcerer. For a sense of Warren’s swagger, watch him in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974). He knows how to scuff up a suit and pour booze on a decapitated head. This might have been Warren Oates’ best performance ever, before he parodied himself as Sergeant Hulka in Stripes (1981).
Back to Roy Scheider, Friedkin wasn’t thrilled with having him in the lead role. He’d believed with McQueen he’d have an actor whose spirit and physical countenance would match the rugged landscape of the film he was seeking to create.
Scheider was a top pick for the producers. He had just finished Jaws (1975), so he came to the film set with some clout. This irked Friedkin and stubbed his command. The two had worked well together on The French Connection (1971). But now that Scheider had killed a great white shark, that meant he held sway over the production.
But this sway isn’t conveyed in the film. If anything, it added to it, Scheider’s wife, Cynthia Bebout, was enlisted as an editor, heightening the film’s intensity, and Sheider doesn’t hesitate to put himself at risk, driving into the hellish maw of this flick.
The montage toward the end when he’s losing his mind driving through a hallucinatory badlands landscape is one of the more surreal and brilliant moments in Sorcerer, the colored hue both midnight cool and ghastly pale.
But it’s the infamous suspension bridge scene that’s makes this movie immortal. It’s also what makes it stand out today. There were zero post special effects used in this scene. All the movie-making magic took place during the shoot. This bridge had to be constructed and deconstructed more than once to make this scene happen.
The intensity of this scene comes with one man driving a truck across a rickety suspension bridge with his partner outside the truck guiding him. This is a metaphor for movie making. To go meta, imagine Friedkin directing this insane scene like the man directing the truck. It could all go down the river. The film crew included!
The editing in this scene is phenomenal. There’s one blackout moment that will literally steal your breath away. But it’s the gravity of this scene, the twist in your gut that you’re witnessing something real, that will stay with you.
The oil fire is real. The explosions are real. The mudslides are real. We’re talking zero CGI bullshit. Yes, some of the theatrical blood is overdone. But that car crash in the first third of the film in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the one that clips a fire hydrant sending a spray of water high into the air. Yeah, that’s real! The water sprays high. The fire sprays high. Sorcerer is one primal flick, earth, fire, water, air.
Friedkin said this about filmmaking (IMDB, Sorcerer Trivia), “Every film is actually three films. There is the film you conceive and plan. There is the film you actually shoot. And there is the film that emerges with you in the editing room.”
And, one could add, there are two more films. There is the film that bombs at the box office. And there is the film that rises from the ashes … to be cherished decades later.
See those rugged men putting the final touches on those refurbished cargo trucks deep in the jungle? The front grill on both trucks looks like the demented mouths of cockeyed dragons. Each truck has multiple search lights for a crazed head of eyes. Each light shines in its own direction out into an evening mist.
There’s room for one more on this trip. Go on, get in. It’ll blow you away.
Demented Flicks 