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.
Every time I watch this movie I'm surprised and amazed at the attention to detail Friedkin brings into every one of his films. It flopped pretty bad in the wake of some other 1977 movies that did pretty well, but it really is a masterpiece that more people should see
Masterpiece of a thriller, all hot and dirty existential dread, constantly tense, and beautifully shot. The soundtrack - mixing Tangerine Dream's dark synths and Kieth Jarrett's mindwarping Spheres - raises the atmosphere to perfection. Roy Scheider has never been better.
Haven't seen The Wages of Fear, but this film is fantastic. The cinematography and practical effects still hold up to this day, and I love the way the film puts you in the shoes of the characters, developng them enough to understand them and their struggle but not enough to be attached to them. However this creates the right amount of tension throughout. One may argue that the sequences of them being almost blown up from the nitro can be redundant, but I think the film uses them the right amount. Also, as a sucker for synth soundtracks, I absolutely love Tangerine Dream's pioneering work here.
Highly recommended!
Back in 1977, William Friedkin (director of The Exorcist, The French Connection, etc.) released Sorcerer, a remake of a 1953 French film, The Wages of Fear, about four desperate men tasked with driving two truckloads of nitroglycerin across a South American jungle landscape.
This movie kicks off with the prologues of the four main characters: a European assassin, an Arab terrorist bomber, a French investor accused of fraud, and a New Jersey gangster (Roy Scheider from Jaws). These outcasts have all separately taken refuge from their respective crimes in a remote South American village where they struggle from day to day to scrounge money to leave this harsh location.
When an oil well fire over 200 miles away from the…
a palestinian terrorist, a french Hitman, an american Mob, and french fraud that will go to Jail in 24 Hours time, all tied togther by fate in small Spainish village, William friedkin made one the greatest movies of the 20 century when he made Sorcerer (1977) ironically it was attacked from critrics all over the world, 30 years later cinema became what mr friedkin had imagined it in 1977 when he made Sorcerer Oddly enough, there is still to this day with this technology some movies that didn't learn from Sorcerer and the depth of simplicity in it Although i couldn't help but to think of the great Costa-Gavras's films and the inspiration it had on Sorcerer If you scraped…
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