| Sorcerer | |
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Theatrical release poster designed by Richard L. Albert |
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| Directed by | William Friedkin |
| Produced by | William Friedkin David Salven |
| Screenplay by | Walon Green |
| Story by | Georges Arnaud (Novel) |
| Starring | Roy Scheider Bruno Cremer Francisco Rabal |
| Music by | Tangerine Dream Keith Jarrett Charlie Parker |
| Cinematography | John M. Stephens Dick Bush |
| Editing by | Bud Smith Robert K. Lambert |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures (USA) Paramount Pictures (non-USA) |
| Release date(s) | June 24, 1977 |
| Running time | 121 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English French Spanish German |
| Budget | $22 million |
| Box office | $12 million |
Sorcerer is a 1977 thriller adventure film, produced and directed by William Friedkin, starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal and Amidou. It is the second remake of the 1953 French film Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear).
Sorcerer followed Friedkin's highly successful The French Connection and The Exorcist. The budget was estimated at over $22 million, a substantial sum at the time. The film gained a fairly positive critical reception but with a reported gross of $12 million, the film did not recoup its costs. The film was co-produced by Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, with Universal handling U.S. distribution and Paramount handling the international release.
Sorcerer is notable for its electronic score by Tangerine Dream, which was the group's first Hollywood film score and led to their becoming popular soundtrack composers of the '80s.
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Four international criminals on the run from the law hide out in a remote village in Nicaragua whose economy is dependent on a major oil company.
An oil well over 200 miles away has caught fire and can be extinguished only with explosives. The criminals are given a chance to earn a great deal of money, no questions asked, by driving trucks carrying unstable dynamite to the blaze. Because they were improperly stored, the sticks are now "sweating" nitroglycerin and could detonate if subjected to shock or vibration.
Driving in teams of two, they meet various hazards on their journey, including a dilapidated rope-suspension bridge swinging violently in a huge storm over a flood-swollen river, a massive tree blocking the road, and a number of desperate, dangerous bandits.
Although he talked to Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson, and Jack Nicholson to find out if they would be interested,[1] Steve McQueen was the director's first choice for the role eventually taken by Roy Scheider, a small-time criminal named Jackie Scanlon who ends up a fugitive from the law and the Mafia after a robbery of a New Jersey church. McQueen loved the script but didn't want to leave the country or wife Ali MacGraw at the time. The stunt coordinator for the film was Bud Ekins, who was Steve McQueen's stunt double in The Great Escape.
Nick Nolte had an audition with Friedkin for the role that went to Scheider.[2] The two later worked together on Blue Chips, the first of four consecutive films Friedkin made for Paramount.
Charles Bluhdorn, whose Gulf+Western conglomerate owned Paramount, was passionate about turning the Dominican Republic into a movie-making mecca. Friedkin insisted the film be shot in the Dominican Republic, so McQueen asked if MacGraw could be a producer (giving her a reason to be on location with him). Friedkin refused, so McQueen turned down the role. The director later regretted his decision, realizing that McQueen's star power might have made it a box-office success.
Production notes on the 1998 Universal DVD release tell a different story, noting that the casting of Scheider as Scanlon/Dominguez was a "foregone conclusion" and "the ideal (perhaps the only) choice for the role" since Friedkin had directed him previously in The French Connection.
In an interview with Robert J. Emery (as part of The Directors series), Friedkin says that he wanted Spanish actor Francisco Rabal for the role of the "Frog One" in the French Connection because he loved the performance of Rabal in Luis Buñuel´s Belle de Jour. But the casting director mistakenly got Fernando Rey instead. Rey's performance ultimately was highly praised by the director and critics. It was not until Sorcerer came along that Friedkin and Rabal finally worked together.
Friedkin had serious issues beyond the clashes between him and the cast and crew. He reportedly did not enjoy his time during the section of the film shot on location in Israel. He also antagonized Paramount, using a Gulf+Western corporate photo for a scene that featured the evil board of directors of the fictional company that hired the men. Ironically, between 1994 and 2003 all of his films were released by Paramount.
Friedkin stated that, during the bridge sequence, the truck teetering against the ropes actually did tip over into the river several times, causing numerous retakes.
Scheider was angry that in the final cut Friedkin removed a subplot that showed his character in a more sympathetic light; it involved him befriending a small boy from the village. For that reason, Scheider consistently refused to comment on the film.
| “ | When our trailer [for Sorcerer] faded to black, the curtains closed and opened again, and they kept opening and opening, and you started feeling this huge thing coming over your shoulder overwhelming you, and heard this noise, and you went right off into space. It made our film look like this little, amateurish piece of shit. I told Billy [Friedkin], ‘We're fucking being blown off the screen. You gotta go see this.’ | ” |
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—Film editor Bud Smith, on his reaction to seeing Star Wars[3] |
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The film's title refers to one of the trucks, which has the name "Sorcerer" painted across the bonnet (the other is named "Lazaro"). There is no supernatural or magical character or event. This caused confusion (and walk-outs) among audiences at the time of the film's release since Sorcerer was marketed as a follow-up to Friedkin's wildly successful occult-themed film The Exorcist. Some newspaper ads included a line: "Not a film about the supernatural."
According to Friedkin, the title fit the film's general theme: "The Sorcerer is an evil wizard and in this case the evil wizard is fate. The fact that somebody can walk out of their front door and a hurricane can take them away, an earthquake or something falling through the roof. And the idea that we don’t really have control over our own fates, neither our births nor our deaths, it’s something that has haunted me since I was intelligent enough to contemplate something like it."
Many point to the film's commercial failure as a result of the movie being released a month after George Lucas' runaway box-office smash of 1977, Star Wars.[3] Friedkin agreed with this assessment during an interview on the Bug DVD. In Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which documents the film's development from start to finish, a story is told of a theater in San Francisco doing historic business with Star Wars, only to draw tiny audiences when Sorcerer replaced it for one week. Friedkin's movie was yanked and Star Wars returned.
Although regarded as a cult film,[4] Sorcerer was not received as well by the public nor film critics as Friedkin's previous two films. In Leonard Maltin's annual "TV Movies" ratings book, the film receives only two-and-a-half out of four stars, with the critique, "Expensive remake of The Wages of Fear never really catches hold despite a few astounding scenes." In Halliwell's Film Guide, the evaluation is even more harsh: "Why anyone would want to spend 20 million dollars on a remake of The Wages of Fear, do it badly, and give it a misleading title is anybody's guess. The result is dire." The film has grown in critical esteem over the years and is widely held in high regard by most movie fans. Sorcerer currently holds a 70% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Despite Sorcerer being one of the most infamous financial flops of the 1970s, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound (Robert Knudson, Robert Glass, Richard Tyler and Jean-Louis Ducarme).[5] Film critic Roger Ebert listed it at #9 on his ten-best films list of 1977.
The film today is more positively received by professional film critics; Rotten Tomatoes gives Sorcerer 80% fresh on its Tomatometer.[6]
On August 21 2009, author Stephen King posted an EW.com article entitled "Stephen King's Reliable Rentals." In his list of "20 [movies] that never disappoint," King placed the original Wages of Fear at #2 and Friedkin's Sorcerer at #1, writing, "Desperate men with nothing to lose set out in a truck convoy through the South American jungle. Their cargo is rotting dynamite sweating nitro, stuff so unstable the least bump may set it off. The original, Wages of Fear, is considered one of the greatest movies of the modern age, but I have a sneaking preference for Sorcerer, William Friedkin's remake. Roy Scheider had two great roles: Chief Brody in Jaws and Jackie Scanlon in Sorcerer. These films generate suspense through beautiful simplicity."[7]
On 16 March 2001, writer/filmmaker Peter Hanson wrote on his blog, "Whereas many self-indulgent films by ’70s auteurs have been injured by time, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer has actually seen its critical stock rise in the intervening decades... Seen now, the picture is a crazily intense thrill ride that matches the inherent tension of the plot with a probing descent into the psyche of an archetypal character driven insane by circumstance... Sorcerer contains one of the most elaborately filmed suspense sequences in cinema history: The precarious crossing of a hand-made bridge across a jungle river in the middle of a horrific rainstorm. Using a staggering number of camera angles, Friedkin drags the scene out to create an excruciating level of tension, and that cinematic commitment carries through to nearly the entire film.[8]
A VHS version of the film was released in 1990. The DVD was released in the U.S. and Canada in 1998 in a non-widescreen version, which is not its original theatrical aspect ratio: it was shown in cinemas at a ratio of 1.85:1. During the 1980s and 1990s, like Stanley Kubrick, Friedkin consistently claimed that he preferred the home video releases of his films to be presented in the fullframe format.[9] However, since widescreen televisions have become popular, Friedkin has allowed many of his other films to be released on DVD in their original widescreen formats (The French Connection, Cruising, To Live and Die in L.A.), and therefore it is possible that Friedkin's position on this issue may have changed.
Currently, there are no plans for a newly remastered release; however, Friedkin's controversial 1980 film Cruising was issued as a deluxe DVD in 2007, with Friedkin indicating that Sorcerer might get the same treatment at some point.
In Europe (where the film was released as Wages of Fear), the entire opening, showing the drivers' reasons for moving to the village, and the ending following the delivery of explosive were cut. These 28 minutes were cut, without Friedkin's consent, by the distributor.[10] In this version, the film opens in the village with the drivers already present, and ends without the audience knowing that a hitman has found Roy Scheider's character. The flashbacks that his character has are retained in this version, which was screened on UK television during the 1980s.
The "Mr. Plow" episode of The Simpsons featured a parody of the film as Homer drives across a rickety bridge. The short scene is scored with vaguely Tangerine Dream-like music.[11]
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