1977 Directed by William Friedkin
Four exiled international criminals on the run hide out in a remote Nicaraguan village whose economy is dependent on an oil company. An oil well 200 miles away catches fire and can be extinguished only with explosives. The criminals are given a chance to earn a great deal of money by transporting highly volatile and sensitive explosives through hazardous and rugged terrain full of obstacles and danger.
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…
It's been 40 years since Sorcerer first came to a South American jungle near you, but it's hard to imagine a time when it didn't exist. Three sequels (with many more to come), three misguided yet often misunderstood prequels, one "Sorcerer Story" (last year's Rogue One, about the embezzlement scheme that leads Sorcerer's Bruno Cremer into exile at the beginning of the movie), countless books, video games, animated cartoons, and one infamous Christmas special later, the pop culture crater left by Sorcerer's impact is so large it makes the tree blown up by the film's heroes look more like a twig.
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…
A cinema of madness. Pure physical detail. Damnation as a form of cinematic spectacle. Man with blood in their hands fulfilling their death wish. What for Clozout is social need, for Friedkin is self-punishment. First world crimes reimagined in a third world purgatory, an amusement park of unforgiven nature. The beauty is that everything is translated in pure action, everything a matter of another form of behavior. Among other things, this is Friedkin’s most compassionate movie, Francisco Rabal taciturn killer is the film’s heart and Bruno Kramer’s masochist banker it is clear-eyed soul.
“In seconds my gesture would remove her from this world. And me? Whose gesture would remove me?”
For me the defining moment is Amidou’s “No!” when his character is forced to cross that first busted bridge; it’s the worthless, childish plea of a man that doesn’t want to play the game of survival anymore...but what choice does he have?
Make it a brutal double feature with Mario Bava’s Kidnapped or Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright.
Nail-bitingly suspenseful. Unwavering. Tersely told with mostly images and little dialogue. Unapologetically diverse, non-Hollywood for a big studio picture from the 70's. Certainly holds your attention the whole way through. That bridge scene. Dang. Solid film.
Fantastic how it is, but if this were maybe a half hour or 45 minutes longer to flesh out the characters and their relationships more, this would be a masterpiece.
It's because of movies like this that I still believe in the cinema and I will never stop searching for masterpieces that has never been showed to me.
Tour de force of a film. Excellent performances and editing. Not a fan of the ending, it felt too ambiguous for a film that ended so strongly until the gunshot. Roy Schieder shines, although it would have been interesting to see Steve McQueen in the roll. I feel like I will get more out of this in repeat viewings. Curious to see other movies (structure-wise) akin to this one.
I don't think I'll be able to review William Friedkin's 'Sorcerer' without comparing it to Henri-Georges Clouzot's 'The Wages of Fear' since both are adaptations of Georges Arnaud's novel.
Both the films are similar in structure. They are both divided into two respective halves. In the first half we get to know about the characters and in the second half we follow them in their thrilling adventure.
However there is a marked difference in the way the two filmmakers make us familiar with the characters. Clouzot's film starts off with all the characters already in exile in the South American country and we get to know about them through their interactions with each other. Friedkin takes a different route. In…
I did not enjoy this version as much as the original "Wages of Fear" but it was still an outstanding movie nonetheless. While this remake gets to the action a lot quicker, I thought the original did a better job of cranking up the stress level.
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