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 gallons of unstable nitroglycerin across dangerous jungle.
Roy Scheider Bruno Cremer Francisco Rabal Amidou Ramon Bieri Peter Capell Karl John Friedrich von Ledebur Chico Martínez Joe Spinell Rosario Almontes Richard Holley Anne-Marie Deschodt Jean-Luc Bideau Jacques François André Falcon Gerard Murphy Desmond Crofton Henry Diamond Ray Dittrich Frank Gio Randy Jurgensen Cosmo 'Gus' Allegretti
Colin C. Mouat Charles L. Campbell Richard Tyler Gary Alexander Robert Knudson Robert Glass Roger Sword Aaron Levy Jean-Louis Ducarme Larry Carow
Atemlos vor Angst, Carga maldita, Le convoi de la peur, Il salario della paura, El salario del miedo, O Comboio do Medo, The Wages of Fear
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.
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.
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…
I like that this is a film that can be enjoyed on multiple levels. You can analyze its philosophy and be viscerally thrilled by the bridge crossing scenes.
The greatness of THE WAGES OF FEAR really casts a long shadow over this one that it was rarely able to overcome for me. You get a taste of the heavy reliance on the visual craft right off with that shot overlooking the street that pulls back into the apartment. Fancy. But this was a case of the polished studio song recording stripping away a lot of the appeal of the killer demo tape track. This movie is like the QOTSA version of Make It Witchu compared to the classic Desert Sessions version. A staple rendered non-essential. Everything is so depicted from the outside-in here, so that it all looks as good as it can be, but the feeling/connection to…
Can’t imagine how this didn’t translate to audiences when it was released. It’s sketched out similarly to French Connection, predicated on tracking corse movement, brief characterization, and a valorization of complicating a bold, cinema verite-style with narrative storytelling.
And likewise, it just fucking rules.
Sorcerer is unbelievably intense and probably my favorite Friedkin film. However, having just watched The Wages of Fear it’s hard not compare the strengths and weakness between the two. Sorcerer ratchets up the filmmaking to 11 and Friedkin orchestrates the action with amazing intensity. The issue is that he seems far more interested in the spectacle than he does in the characters. The relationships Clouzot develops in Wages of Fear are far more fleshed out so when the “HOLY SHIT” moments unfold, the stakes feel so much higher because you’re not only invested in what happens to them, but also believe that they actually care about what happens to each other. Sorcerer’s main four are all out for themselves and…
William Friedkin's masterpiece encapsulates what made film in the 1970s so fuckin awesome. Actors didn't wander back to their airconditioned trailers before cruising to set and hanging off a green screen cliff with 13 wires attached to them. They sweated it out in the jungle, without a craft service table in sight. If you had to blow some shit up well then you had one take to really blow some shit up. This is exactly what I want from a film.
Jack 380 films
Films that leave you visibly shaken; masterclasses in building tension that make you truly feel anxious for whatever is happening…
Tobias Andersen 7,604 films
Rules: Generate a number (from 1 to x) via: www.random.org
See how many number of films there are in the…
Darren Carver-Balsiger 750 films
Pessimistic worldviews. For when you want to wallow in despair.
It doesn't matter if we all die.
Suggestions welcome.
