Sometimes, timing is everything.
In 1977, William Friedkin was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. His landmark action thriller The French Connection cleaned up at the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony, taking home five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Two years later, Friedkin followed that up with an even bigger success, the horror classic The Exorcist, which broke box office records and became a cultural touchstone that is widely considered to be one of the scariest movies ever made. The future was wide open and the popular director had the leverage to make any film he wanted. He set his sights on a remake of The Wages of Fear, a 1953 thriller from French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, about a group of four men faced with the difficult task of driving trucks filled with nitroglycerin through the dangerous mountain roads of South America. One false move on unsteady terrain could lead to instant death. The result is a film that is deeply cynical and horrifying, a brutal indictment of a corporate system that exploits the desperate and the poor, complete with a darkly ironic gut punch of an ending. It would seem to be the perfect film to be remade for the 1970s, an era when directors such as Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese were making films that reflected the malaise of the post-Watergate years. Friedkin's remake, entitled Sorcerer, was set to open in the summer of 1977 and would undoubtedly be another hit that would be embraced by critics and audiences alike.
Or so it seemed. Unfortunately for Friedkin, a new kind of movie had been released in the spring of that year that had captured the hearts and minds of moviegoers: a little film called Star Wars. The tastes of the general public had shifted from gritty realism to escapist fantasy, and offered a different type of viewing experience. While Star Wars had clearly defined heroes and villains, Sorcerer offered a quartet of morally ambiguous anti-heroes with criminal backgrounds. While Luke Skywalker and his friends were guided through life with a mystical Force, the protagonists of Friedkin's film face one hardship after another and make it through only with dogged perseverance. While Star Wars has a happy ending in which evil is defeated and the heroes triumph, Sorcerer ends on a downbeat note, in which the efforts of the main characters appear to have been all for nothing. It's not hard to see why the American public might have rejected a dark, unnerving thriller in favor a comforting fantasy. Critics were also hard on the film and the director for having the nerve to remake a foreign classic. (Compare that criticism to today's film industry, where nearly every hit film from another country is remade for American audiences.) Another source of confusion was the movie's title (the name of the truck driven by Roy Scheider's character), and audiences who assumed that the director of The Exorcist had another supernatural chiller prepared for them were in for a big surprise.
All of these helped contribute to the movie's poor box office and lukewarm critical reception, which is a shame, because Sorcerer is a masterful work that is definitely worth a second look.
Like its predecessor, this movie is centered around a group of broke, desperate men who are hired by an oil company in a small South American town to drive the aforementioned nitroglycerin-stocked trucks. But while the backgrounds of the characters in the original film remain unknown, Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green spend the first 45 minutes setting up the origins of our anti-heroes. Nilo (Francisco Rabal) is a contract killer from Vera Cruz. Kassem (Amidou) is a Palestinian terrorist on the run after a bombing in Jerusalem. Victor (Bruno Cremer) is a French banking official facing indictment for embezzlement and haunted by his partner's suicide. Jackie (Roy Scheider) is a New Jersey gangster in hiding after killing a priest who turned out to be the brother of a rival mob boss. All of them have fled to a small South American village to escape their pasts and have taken on this deadly, nearly suicidal task out of desperation. Much like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, this is the story of corrupt, untrustworthy men whose desire for wealth eventually brings about their undoing.
Like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, Friedkin is a master of generating suspense. One particularly brilliant set piece features Jackie and Nilo attempting to drive their truck over a rickety suspension bridge during a rainstorm, with Kassem and Victor following behind in their own vehicle. The frustration and terror felt by each men is made palpably real by each actor's performance and by Friedkin's skillful direction. Another beautifully-shot sequence features Jackie driving his truck through a desert landscape as surreal and alien as any of the outer space worlds from George Lucas's sci-fi epic. It is during this scene that Jackie struggles to maintain his sanity as guilt and fear begin to overwhelm him, and Scheider's performance may be one of the high points of his career. The movie ends on a brutally ironic note where, without giving too much away, Jackie learns that while he may be finished with his past, his past isn't necessarily finished with him.
Like many films that have initially crashed and burned at the box office, Sorcerer has had a critical re-evaluation over the past few decades, and is now considered a forgotten classic of the 1970s. The movie's fans include filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who named it one of his twelve favorite movies of all time, and author Stephen King, who called it one of his go-to video rentals. Friedkin himself calls it the best movie he has ever made. After having only been available in heavily butchered versions, an official cut of the film approved by Friedkin was released on Blu-ray in 2014 by Warner Home Video and is well worth seeking out. Disappointingly, it features no commentary or any other special features, but it does feature a booklet containing an excerpt from the director's autobiography, The Friedkin Connection, which sheds a lot of insight on the making of the film and is definitely worth a read. Fans of this uncompromisingly bleak work of '70s cinema can rejoice that this lost film has been found again.
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