sorcerer

Although Jaws (1975) is credited as the first modern blockbuster, director William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) actually got there first and created the some sort of theatrical phenomena. While Spielberg was able to use his film a springboard to further his career, Friedkin just treaded water. By the time Sorcerer (1977) was released four years later, the industry had changed. Audiences wanted escapism, and Friedkin’s sprawling remake of Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) was simply not marquee material.

But as is the case with so many films that fail to find an audience in their own era, Sorcerer has earned back a large degree critical respect. In fact, it’s aged better than the film it was based on, crafted with a rough documentary-style approach and a series of arrhythmia-inducing suspense sequences that hold up as some of the best work of the 1970s…by any director!

Featuring an international cast and an impressive amount of foreign locations, Sorcerer stars Roy Schneider as one of a quartet of fugitives who’ve hunkered down in the jungles of Nicaragua to escape their respective crimes. But circumstances conspire to put them behind the wheel of two trucks carrying a load of unstable dynamite across the country to extinguish a fire at an American oil well. If they can make it 218 miles, the rewards will be extraordinary. But the odds are definitely not in their favor.

Sorcerer is such an incredibly intense film that one continually invents theories for exactly why it failed to find an audience. Star Wars, which was released only months before, is an easy scapegoat. So is the title itself, which suggests some sort of continuation of the supernatural themes of The Exorcist (there are a number of demonic images in the film – including the grill of the “sorcerer” truck itself – but all seem secondary to the plot).

Rather than try and explain why the film failed, it’s more enjoyable to celebrate its rediscovery. From the self-contained backstories of each character to the white-knuckle bridge crossing during a jungle monsoon, Friedkin is in perfect control from beginning to end. His emphasis on sound design and sparse but effective musical cues carries over from The Exorcist but his canvas is so much larger. Sorcerer looks like it was photographed somewhere just south of hell. One would be hard pressed to think of a film that seems more authentic outside of a Werner Herzog picture.

Not everything works. Roy Scheider is a bit too likable to be dangerous (Friedkin claims in his recent autobiography that Steve McQueen turned down the role for scheduling reasons) and the pacing on the front end drags from time to time. But Sorcerer is anything but a career-killing film. In fact, given a second chance, it’s the movie that should have made Friedkin a cinematic immortal.

That sort of arrogance is just what put the director in the Hollywood doghouse in the first place. See for yourself in excerpts from The Friedkin Connection, the sole extra on this remastered blu-ray. Why no commentary or retrospective? Who knows, but it is a real humdinger of a hi-def image. The buzz on the internet is that Friedkin once again twisted a few too many knobs during the transfer (as he did with the first release of The French Connection), but to my eyes the blu-ray is a stunning piece of work.