As a fan of macho movies, I was completely floored by William Friedkin's Sorcerer. It's a story of desperate men doing desperate things set in a desperate situation. 

Who needs a bunch of dialogue when you have savage macho men driving and working on big trucks? The trucks, if driven wrong, will blow up. You're driving a truck in the jungle, it's raining, there's no paved roads, trees are down everywhere and the bridges look like they're about to fall down. The scenes on the bridge would give the healthiest of hearts, a sudden heart attack. It's so tense, I'm certain I forgot to breathe. Add in the perfect mood music by Tangerine Dream, and Sorcerer is one of the…

The usual line of attack against The Wages of Fear is that it takes too long to get going, with a lot of wheel-spinning and artless political supertext taking up too much time before the action starts. I love Wages, but I have to admire Friedkin's dodge here, opening on 20 minutes or so of pure crosshatched nastiness, setting up each of his characters' circumstances not so much to explain why they would agree to take on such a dangerous mission but to establish that the world is so inescapably terrible that you might as well go out with a bang anyway. It's as edgy as any of the explosive set-pieces that come later, so much so that the rare…

Sorcerer is one of those films that I kind of heard about but never quite got round to seeing mostly because it is so hard to get a copy of it in Japan.

At first glance, one would think that Sorcerer is simply about four desperate men—A Mexican hitman, a Palestinian militant, a French businessman and an American getaway driver—on the margins of a forgotten South American town who agreed to drive trucks packed with explosive Nitroglycerine across rugged terrain for an American Oil Company. But I think it's a lot more than that.

If one were to pay attention to several scenes and mise en scéne in this film , one would come away thinking that the settings used…

Wie gestrandete Wale fristeten sie ihr Leben im südamerikanischen Dschungel. Hoffnungslos vegetierten sie kochend in ihren eigenen Säften die von ihnen abstand wie ein vor sich gehaltenes Schild. Um sie herum wucherte die grüne Hölle und ihre Sporen fraßen sich gierig in ihre von Mücken vergewaltigen Epidermis.

Als dann, tief und abgeschottet einer menschenwürdigen Behausung, kam ihre Rettung aus diesem immerwährenden Fall eines Alptraumes der zum Leben erwachte mit der aufgerissenen Wunde Muttererde und ihrem gen Himmel gespucktes, brodelndes Blut.

Vier Mann begannen nun ihre Höllenfahrt, ein Ritt ihrer mit der Rettung gesattelten Fracht. Durch das Herz einer pochenden Vegetation die ihre Fänge nach ihnen ausstreckten. Vorbei an Abgründen als ein Widerhall ihrer Sünden. Auf Brücken jenseits eines Hoffnungsschimmers und…

Perfectionist William Friedkin has said his thinking man’s action film Sorcerer is the only movie he’s made that he wouldn’t re-do a single shot.

This heady, machismo action film (too much set-up, too much brainy plot! was the original complaint) was released on June 24, 1977 while “Star Wars” had been released on May 25 and still packing in repeat business, both from 20th Century Fox. This remake of the just as robust French classic “Wages of Fear” (1953) is known today for the mesmerizing jungle scenery that is without par, and an uncommonly intelligent and anti-formula script for an action film.

The plot: Roy Scheider is one of four men who have to navigate a transport truck over South…

An adaptation of Georges Arnaud's novel that was also the basis for Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer is William Friedkin's entirely compelling, densely atmospheric and at times nightmarish counterpart to Clouzot's classic. While the basic, surface structure of the plot is mostly the same, the suspense is just as poignant and the cynical view, firmly established from the start, remains present throughout, the experience is different but in the good sense of the word. Sorcerer feels more epic and more mythical (due in no small part to Tangerine Dream's hypnotic score) while still very real. This is achieved through a more distant and hermetic approach akin to documentaries that doesn't allow open spaces for cliches or melodrama to…

TFW your besties, your therapist and even your crush himself have all said he’s a piece of shit and you finally begin to believe them because you’re so tired of being angry with him *all the time* but you watch this one last movie he won’t shut up about because you have to understand how one person could become so horrifically abusive and disgusting and bleed his traumas out onto others so much so that he’d actually get philosophically on-the-nose tattoos wherein he’d actually have the trauma on his hands and use it to spread his damage to everything he touches and at this point you’re just so wholly disgusted by this person and the idea that you ever once…

"It's the kind of place nobody wants to go looking"

The magic of Sorcerer is in its white knuckle suspense that grips so tight at moments you might just pop from the strain it's putting on your heart.

Friedkin opens Sorcerer in a series of introductions that take place in different parts of the world. We're shown four different people all with varying acts of crime being committed that eventually lead to them having to flee their countries. The time spent with each character is suitable and gives a good enough idea as to the type of people they are and who we'll be spending time with. It doesn't linger, gets to the point and moves on to its second…