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Your
cat coughed up a
hairball last night and
when you got out of bed
this morning, you
stepped on it. The
coffee ran out two days
ago so you had to hit
the drive-thru again,
but first you needed to
swing by the gas
station because your
tank was on empty.
Naturally, the queue at
the pumps reached the
street. To add insult
to insult, gas is
nearly $5 per gallon
courtesy our batshit
crazy
“President.”
And to add injury to
injury, while you
waited—knowing
that now you’d be
late for work—a
driver rear-ended your
car.
If you’ve had a
trying day, a hectic
week, or you’re
going through a rough
patch, have I got a
cinematic dose of
relativity for you, a riveting film to shrink your quotidian ordeals down to the annoyance of a pesky fly at a picnic: Sorcerer.
Sorcerer was director William Friedkin’s 1977 adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel The Wages of Fear. A fine French film with the same title as the book, directed by Henri-George Clouzot, and starring Yves Montand came out in 1953. Friedkin chafed at the notion of his film being a “remake,” insisting that it was a better realization of the book.
If you never heard of Sorcerer it’s not your fault. Despite Friedkin’s directorial fame for his previous two films, The
French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), his new movie had the bad luck to debut on the heels of a George Lucas sci-fi flick called Star Wars.
Several other feel-good
summer blockbusters
also cut into Sorcerer’s ticket sales, namely Smokey
and the Bandit, Saturday Night Fever,
and another sci-fi
blockbuster by Steven
Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Friedkin’s
decision to call the
movie
“Sorcerer”
(part of his effort to
distance it from
Clouzot’s 1953
film) also led some to
think that it would be
about magic or the
supernatural, a kind of
follow-up to The
Exorcist.
A true “lost classic,” Sorcerer will dazzle you with its vibrant colors and astonishing camera work; it’s a visually arresting film, sumptuous to the eye. The actors earn their pay—and then some! But most of all, Sorcerer is the definition of a hard-minded
movie.
Four prologues, all
shot on location, bring
the disparate
protagonists
together.
Nilo, portrayed with
sinister aplomb by
Spanish actor Francisco
Rabal, coolly
dispatches a victim
with a silenced pistol
in a Veracruz hotel
room. Near
Jerusalem’s
Damascus Gate, Kassem
and his three
Palestinian comrades
plant a bomb, board a
bus, and hightail it as
the ordnance explodes.
Soon after, the Israeli
Defense Force raids
their lair, killing two
of the men and
capturing a third;
Kassem, played by
Amidou (stage name of
Moroccan-French actor
Hamidou Benmassaoud),
barely escapes. In
swankier circles in
Paris, financier Victor
Manzon, played by
French actor Bruno
Cremer, faces financial
ruin and heavy jail
time. Meanwhile in
Elizabeth, New Jersey,
Roy Scheider is back as
Jackie Scanlon, member
of an Irish crew who
choose the wrong parish
bingo game to knock
over. While stealing
the money, one of the
robbers shoots a priest
who turns out to be the
brother of a powerful
Mafia hood. As they
make a high-speed
getaway, an argument
erupts in the car and
they crash; only
Scanlon survives . . .
but he won’t live
long if he sticks
around.
Fleeing their
respective scenes, they
all end up in Porvenir,
an appalling dump in an
unnamed South American
dictatorship.
It’s a company
town for a nearby
American oil-drilling
operation, though
“town” is
an exceedingly generous
term for Porvenir;
Jackie Scanlon’s
friend described it as
“somewhere nobody
wants to go.”
When an explosion at
the oil well starts an
unquenchable fire, it
creates an opportunity.
The oil company needs
dynamite to blow out
the blaze. The catch?
Their dynamite has sat
for years in a storage
shed 218 miles away and
the nitroglycerin is
leaking out of the
sticks, making it
perilously dangerous to
handle. Air transport
is out of the question.
So the company offers a
fat cash reward to four
drivers willing to
drive two trucks with
the dynamite—two
trucks for redundancy
since it’s
probably a suicide
mission.
Naturally, Jackie,
Victor, Kassem, and
Nilo earn the driving
honors. But even before
their ordeal of a trek
begins, they have to
piece together two
viable trucks from a
graveyard of rusting
hulks. Friedkin
presents their sweaty,
back-breaking work in a
sequence to make one of
Rocky Balboa’s
trademark train-ups
look like the Italian
Stallion’s
getting ready for the
Pillsbury Bake-Off.
The almost endless
difficulties of their
odyssey beggar belief.
They’re not
cruising paved
highways; a billy goat
would think twice about
some of these
precipitous roads. No
sequence better
captures the
desperation and
near-insanity of their
task than the rope
bridge crossing. The
trucks they’re
driving are variations
of the GMC M211 used by
the US Army during the
Korean War. They weigh
about six tons….
Sorcerer has so many virtues. Along with watching the grudging
cooperation of these four paranoid fugitives slowly turn into a
glimmer of camaraderie, the evolution of their faces will captivate
you. What an exquisite collection of mugs! Real men with real
character, even as they’re worn down into wraiths. The trucks
have mugs too—more like maws with ghoulish teeth. The front
grille of Sorcerer (yes, it’s the nickname of one of the M211s)
conveys genuine menace!
The purest mug of all belongs to Roy Scheider, de facto leader of
the convoy. His garb also conveys a classically rugged look
borrowed from Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre and later made utterly iconic by Harrison Ford as Indiana
Jones. It ’s likely a coincidence, but “Scanlon” in Irish means “the
cantankerous one” — was any character more aptly named?
Of all his superb films, Friedkin took his greatest pride in Sorcerer. When asked by the British Film Institute, Stephen King,
who knows a great suspenseful story when he sees one or writes
one, said that Sorcerer is “my favorite film of all time.” In June of
2025, Sorcerer was released on Blu-ray and 4K Ulltra-HD Blu
-ray by The Criterion Collection.
Whether you’ve burned the toast or just want to view a
masterpiece from what is arguably cinema’s greatest decade,
watch Sorcerer, savor its textures, its colors, its unrelenting hard
-mindedness, and count your blessings, buddy.
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