Sorcerer
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Director William Friedkin passed away in 2023. Among the tributes that many of today’s younger filmmakers paid to him was to acknowledge the incredible feat of his career in the 1970s when he made two certifiable American classics back-to-back—1971’s The French Connection, followed two years later by The Exorcist.
With those twin blockbusters to his credit, Friedkin had the creative and box office muscle to make anything he wanted for his next project. He chose to adapt a French novel called Wages of Fear, which the brilliant French director Henri-Georges Clouzot had already made into a movie in 1953, and his version was justifiably regarded as a masterpiece.
When Friedkin released his version of the story in 1977, it was called Sorcerer. Its budget had been so enormous because of its production demands that two studios had to team up to finance it. Sadly, Sorcerer was both a critical and a commercial flop. In recent years, however, many critics have re-evaluated the film and now call it a towering achievement. And for good reason.
A dark, foreboding, high adventure fable about four men on the run from fate.
Sorcerer is a dark, foreboding, high adventure fable about four men on the run from fate, which is hunting them to pay for their past crimes. The men are criminals from different walks of life, hiding out in a dangerous Latin American village, desperately looking for a way to escape. Their chance comes when an oil well deep in the jungle explodes and burns out of control. The only way to stop the fire is to blow up the well. So, the oil company offers money and new passports if the four men will drive two trucks to the site of the well, each one loaded with unstable crates of nitroglycerin. The men seize the chance! They are ready to risk it all! Anything to get out of the hell they’re trapped in, even if it means driving their dangerous cargo in broken-down trucks on treacherous jungle roads, with threats at every turn. The slightest bump and the dynamite will explode and carry the men to their doom.
The sequence in which they drive their trucks over an ancient wooden bridge that’s on the verge of collapsing during a violent rainstorm is one of the greatest stunts ever filmed. No computer or models were used. Just brilliant, old school visual effects.
I give Sorcerer a blistering four out of four stars. With a haunting electronic soundtrack by the band Tangerine Dream, Sorcerer is an edge-of-your-seat thriller, as well as a stark meditation on the struggle to survive even as the sins of the past are coming to collect their due.
