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
The Wages of Fear, Il salario della paura, Carga maldita, Atemlos vor Angst, O Comboio do Medo, El salario del miedo, Le convoi de la peur
Perfect movie if you want to reorient yourself on your couch and go "aaAAAaa jesus christ" every few minutes. Provokes such visceral reactions I'm aching to rewatch it with different people. (Several months apart, so my bones have time to settle between viewings.) Makes Uncut Gems look like a vacation slideshow.
While I'm here– William Friedkin's a psychopath, right? Drives me nuts that all the stories about his insane filmmaking antics genuinely result in masterpieces. Like yes, he shot a car chase in New York without a permit and fired guns on set, but out of that we got The French Connection and The Exorcist. These movies should've sucked to teach us all a lesson. Real irresponsible failing on the universe's part. One (1) human belongs in a cage and it's William Friedkin.
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…
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.
A dirty, hopeless hell-ride for the sinners on and offscreen (you!) Hypothetically, During his “yup, nope” song that went viral amid last summer’s global pandemic (outcome pending), E-40 would have had “yup!” to say about this over-looked masterpiece!
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.
"The Sorcerer is an evil wizard and, in this case, the evil wizard is fate. The fact that somebody can walk out of their front door and a hurricane can take them away, an earthquake or something falling through the roof. And the idea that we don’t really have control over our own fates, neither our births nor our deaths; it’s something that has haunted me since I was intelligent enough to contemplate something like it."
"I wasn't prepared for my success or failure. I felt... buffeted by fate without any control over [my] destiny. That's one of the themes of Sorcerer. No matter how much you struggle, you get blown up. [...] It's about revenge, vengeance, betrayal – this is how I feel about life.... life is filled with betrayal... false promises... fate is waiting around the corner to kick you in the ass."
- William Friedkin
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…
