Sorcerer (1977) | Little White Lies

Sor­cer­er (1977)

27 Oct 2017 / Released: 27 Oct 2017

A middle-aged man with a serious expression, wearing a denim jacket against a blurred, natural background.
A middle-aged man with a serious expression, wearing a denim jacket against a blurred, natural background.
4

Anticipation.

A rare chance to catch up with William Friedkin’s crazed jungle caper.

5

Enjoyment.

An audacious and nail-biting thrillride, even though you know the outcome.

5

In Retrospect.

Puts contemporary thrillers to shame.

Don’t miss this rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to catch William Friedkin’s for­got­ten mas­ter­piece on the big screen.

The year is 1977, and direc­tor William Fried­kin has had back-to-back hits, rein­vent­ing the hor­ror film and the police pro­ce­dur­al in the process with The Exor­cist and The French Con­nec­tion. His next move was an adap­ta­tion of Georges Arnaud’s 1941 nov­el Le Salaire de la peur’, which was also the basis for Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot’s ear­li­er film, The Wages of Fear.

How­ev­er, despite being based on the same source mate­r­i­al, each film rep­re­sents a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent artis­tic approach. Crit­i­cal com­par­isons of the two films most like­ly hurt Sorcerer’s box-office, but in addi­tion to that, a lit­tle sci­ence fic­tion movie called Star Wars came out at rough­ly the same time, which didn’t help either.

Both films are about a group of men who are so des­per­ate that they decide to take up essen­tial­ly a sui­cide mis­sion to dri­ve trucks filled with explo­sives across haz­ardous ter­rain. The orig­i­nal was large­ly about Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism, while Sor­cer­er is far vaguer about what the coun­try of ori­gin is for the oil com­pa­ny that is offer­ing to pay. Fried­kin used the jun­gles of Por­venir, Chile as his loca­tion, where the men have been exiled from their home­lands due to every­thing from acts of ter­ror­ism to mob activ­i­ty, and are now unable to leave.

The sit­u­a­tion in Por­venir is very sim­i­lar to the night­mar­ish clos­ing chap­ters of Jim Thompson’s The Get­away, where a group of crim­i­nals end up in a small Mex­i­can town known as El Rey only to be con­front­ed by can­ni­bal­ism. The sit­u­a­tion in Por­venir isn’t quite that extreme, as the men receive a small glim­mer of hope when they take up this dan­ger­ous job in the form of a pos­si­ble big pay­off for the survivors.

Sor­cer­er delves deep­er into the psy­che of the char­ac­ters than The Wages of Fear, espe­cial­ly Roy Schei­der as Jack­ie Scan­lon, who is clear­ly mod­elled on Humphrey Bog­a­rt in The Trea­sure of The Sier­ra Madre. Scan­lon is an every­man who serves as the audience’s eyes through­out the film, and he is also more ground­ed than the crazed, des­per­ate min­er por­trayed by Bog­a­rt. You feel his des­per­a­tion, but it’s all inter­nalised. The desert sequences near the end of the film are deeply hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry, you feel you are hal­lu­ci­nat­ing just like Scan­lon. At times it feels like a slight­ly more con­tained Apoc­a­lypse Now.

The main theme of the film is fate, which Fried­kin con­sid­ered an evil wiz­ard”, hence the title (one of the two trucks is also called Sor­cer­er). It’s about how des­tiny always has a way of decid­ing things before you can turn them around. It’s a deeply pes­simistic world­view, and what with Water­gate expos­ing abuse of pow­er in the high­est ech­e­lons of gov­ern­ment, per­haps the view­ing pub­lic of the time sim­ply want­ed more hope­ful films like Star Wars or Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind.

The fail­ure of Sor­cer­er with crit­ics and audi­ences was an ear­ly blow to the New Hol­ly­wood move­ment of the 1970s, which would be cre­mat­ed with the fail­ure of Heaven’s Gate in 1980, a sim­i­lar­ly pes­simistic and over-bud­get­ed film. The title of Friedkin’s film also worked against it, with the dis­trib­u­tors even­tu­al­ly includ­ed the fol­low­ing dis­claimer: Not a film about the supernatural’.

Viewed today, Sor­cer­er deserves to be con­sid­ered among the director’s great­est achieve­ments. Schei­der was rarely bet­ter, and the film show­cas­es a tru­ly inter­na­tion­al cast who all bring their A game, although with the excep­tion of Ami­dou they were not Friedkin’s first, sec­ond or even third choic­es. The pul­sat­ing score by Tan­ger­ine Dream com­plete­ly changed how Hol­ly­wood thought of elec­tron­ic music, and was sub­se­quent­ly used as the temp score for many films. Sor­cer­er is a stun­ning reimag­in­ing of a mas­ter­piece, one that cru­cial­ly doesn’t try to repli­cate what came before. Instead, it fol­lows its own dan­ger­ous path.

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