Review: Sorcerer (1977)
Anyone who likes to indulge in a little film nerdery, either for pay or pro bono, probably has a master list of films that they haven’t seen that they should get on their ass and see immediately. Wages of Fear is on that list, and on that list it remains. The American remake, Sorcerer, by William Friedkin was also on that list, and here we are today. Apologies for the chronological flip flop.
I’ve read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and it would seem that, at the time, Sorcerer was one of those grand, Quixoteish follies that destroyed 1970s superstar William Friedkin. More recently the film has had a sort of cult following, I know I’ve read that filmmaker Roger Avery considers it one of the best remakes of all time. Sorcerer is pretty remarkable, its a hard, gritty, sweaty, dity picture and Friedkin’s robot like absence of anything resembling empathy really suits the subject matter here. Sorcerer, like most Friedkin, feels more like an exercise than a film (yes, I’m including The Exorcist in that group people), but its one hell of an exercise; a perverse, cynical exploration of do or be done, of fuck it all existential doom.
The plot, which I assume is very similar in Wages of Fear, centers around four men, of varying desperation, who find themselves transporting two cases of severely unstable dynamite in a couple of trucks that would look at home in Duel. Except they are liable to break down at any minute (Dennis Weaver caught no such luck in the Spielberg film.) and the men must take the trucks over South American terrain that’s laughable in its extremity. Two elongated sequences of the trucks crossing the same teetery totery bridge at differing times rank as Friedkin’s finest exercise in purely visceral suspense, note perfect in execution.
The men themselves are all fine, obviously not filled in much, but that is sort of the point, humans are taking the back seat to squirmy cruel chance here. If a cursory look around the net is to be trusted, Friedkin wasn’t satisfied with how Roy Scheider, as the lead and the only American, turned out in the film. I’m not sure why. Scheider brings to the part what he brought to many notable films of the 1970s: an understated everyman quality that you believe in regardless of whatever is transpiring around him. But Scheider is more than that even, he’s an everyman tough guy, and that is rarer still.
I think Friedkin’s sensibility normally hurts his almost great pictures (French Connection, The Exorcist) but helps his just ok pictures (the underrated The Hunted). In the great movies you crave a little more, in the Bish movies you appreciate the straightforward lack of horseshit. Sorcerer may be Friedkin’s best movie, because it merges these effects. It’s a trick (like killing ants with a magnifying glass) but its an undeniably brilliant trick.
