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…

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…

What do an American mobster, Mexican assassin, Palestinian terrorist and corrupt French banker all have in common? Well, in William Friedkin's Sorcerer they're all wanted fugitives tasked to pull off one the single most dangerous jobs on earth, transporting two truckloads of unstable Nitroglycerin throughout 200 miles of extremely treacherous jungle terrain. The Nitroglycerin is to be used to extinguish a raging fire burning inside of a nearby oil well and the four fugitives are the only ones desperate or dumb enough to embark on this potentially life-threatening journey. Coming off the back-to-back successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist, it really seemed as though Friedkin could do no wrong, that is until the tepid critical and commercial response…

Nah sorry comrades, but I watched The Wages of Fear just under a year ago and it pisses all over this.

You can feel Friedkin's ambition here, which means the personal message that Clouzot brought to the proceedings is lost in favour of that kind of bloated New Hollywood 'fuck it, I can make the best goddamn picture ever' attitude. This is perhaps best evinced by his decision to spend a good deal of time establishing the characters and just how they came to be in such dire straits. Did we really need this? I mean it ought to be obvious that these are not angelic men after all. The fact that such scene-setting tests the patience of some audiences…