great_badir
Posts: 4178
Joined: 6/10/2005
From: A breaking rope bridge in the middle of the jungle
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Because I think it’s time to give it further justice outside of my original top 150 and go over the eight odd year journey it took me to see it…
Spoilers, maybe.
Sorcerer, William Friedkin (1977)
“Dominguez” - a small time New York hood, involved with a gang who do over a mob funded church racket
“Serrano” - a French businessman whose previously successful business is on the brink of total financial ruin
“Nilo” - a shady hitman who does a runner after a mysterious hit
“Martinez” – an Israeli rebel/terrorist who is responsible for a lethal street side bomb
Four shitheel scumbags wind up in what must be the filthiest village in South America, thanks to various unfortunate circumstances they’ve engineered of their own accord, and eek out their minimal and punishing existence surrounded by death, decay, political upheaval and all around misery, whilst being constantly reminded of their dodgy deeds back home and the fact that they’re in a place where they can’t even get a cold soft drink from the local fleapit bar. Luckily for them, the local oil well (which is the only source of income for the village) explodes after being sabotaged by terrorists. The oil company offers those who are interested a chance to make some serious money and the chance to escape from a living hell – a suicide mission to deliver a payload of unstable nitro glycerine, leaked from sticks of rotting dynamite stored hundreds of miles away in a small wooden hut swallowed up by dense jungle, over land in custom fit trucks, which is the only thing that will put out the intense oil fire.
Few films in my nearly thirty year “career” as a film buff have had as much of an affect (effect?) on me as ‘Sorcerer’. A film generally best known for being a poor, unnecessary and under performing remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s pitch perfect and, as far as most people are concerned, untouchable ‘La Salaire de la peur’ (AKA ‘The Wages of Fear’, of course). For the record I love Clouzot’s original – it IS a brilliant film, a masterpiece. But, hell, I am not ashamed to say that out of the two I prefer ‘Sorcerer’ (is that further accusations of madness I hear?). I’ve always loved discovering obscure and long forgotten films. Most were, and still are, shit and are usually obscure and long forgotten for that very reason – the thrill is, partly, in the chase – but the shit ones made and still make the rare gems that crop up every now and again seem even more of a worthy find. It was through exhaustive film watching I “discovered” the likes of ‘Juggernaut’, ‘Fitzcarraldo’, ‘Andrei Rublev’, ‘The Taking of Pelham 123’ (which always seemed to be consigned to the VHS bargain bin and consequently ignored in pretty much every shop it was sold in), ‘Django’, ‘Django Kill’, ‘Strange Brew’ and ‘Blade Runner’ - it seems ridiculous now, but ‘Blade Runner’ has not always been the bona fide and certified sci-fi masterpiece it’s now accepted to be. Time was when it was Ridley Scott’s ignored “other” sci-fi film which starred Harrison Ford, not in ‘Star Wars’ mode, doing a rubbish voice over about some confusing robots going AWOL. Or something. That bloke from the Guinness ads was in it too. Likewise with the other films I’ve listed above – in the days of pricy VHS, James Ferman and an almost casual disregard for anything old or out of the mainstream (although you were reasonably well served if you were a fan of new-wave Hong Kong cinema, or anime), all of these, now accepted as well known classics, were then little known by the masses. So too with ‘Sorcerer’. But, unlike those other films, ’Sorcerer’ was impossible to find and it took forever to appear on my radar – it seemed to be the most obscure of known obscure films.
It’s the late 80s coming into the very early 90s and, as an almost-teenager, all I know about ‘Sorcerer’ is that it was a box office disaster directed by the same guy who did ‘The French Connection’ and ‘The Exorcist’ (which was still banned) and that some critic called Mark Kermode (who has since become the only critic I will ever have any major respect for [please note this thread is not the place to discuss your Kermode feelings]), writing for several newspapers and magazines, divided half his time going on about ‘The Exorcist’ and the other half going on about ‘Sorcerer’, a film he thought was long overdue and deserved firm re-appraisal. By this time I’d already seen and loved the original thanks to my dad (it was one of his favourite films) via Moviedrome, back in the good ol’ Alex Cox days, and wondered how on earth an American remake could do it any justice. I ask my dad, who I got my film buffery from, about ‘Sorcerer’. He’s aware of it but hasn’t seen it and, besides, who needs to see a remake of an already perfect film? Aside from a heavily edited VHS released in the first half of the 80s, which itself seems to be impossible to track down, it’s not easily available to rent or buy in the UK. My local video rental place has it on the books, but their supplier can’t get hold of it. There’s only a few copies in the country, apparently. (Of course I get my dad to do all this for me because, at the time, the BBFC had inexplicably slapped it with an 18 certificate – interestingly ‘Sorcerer’s’ entry has been removed from the BBFC website since its revamp…hmmm). As for an airing on TV – forget about it. It remains something of an enigma.
Move forward to the mid 90s, or thereabouts. The internet has just about rolled out to most of the country and I’m waiting at least twenty seconds for each page to load, still confused about how all this information made its way through a tiny cable when just a few years before I was waiting fifteen minutes for The Secret of Monkey Island to load up directly from a disk on my Amiga 500. Whilst browsing numerous film related web sites, I come across a site called the Internet Movie Database, which pretty much renders my collection of Halliwell’s books useless. I start searching through for some films I’ve been trying to track down and remember ‘Sorcerer’. Word on IMDB is mixed and unclear. It has a relatively low score and it seems that few people have seen it. I ask around my film geek friends (for, by this time, we have become confirmed film geeks with an impressive collective knowledge). None of them have heard of it either. Yet again it remains an enigma.
Fast forward a bit more. Kermode’s written a one page piece about ‘Sorcerer’ in the back of an issue of Neon magazine, praising it as one of the greatest American action thrillers of all time and certainly in the top five remakes. I’ve been a member of the DVD revolution for a year or two and have a spanky first generation Panasonic player. Purely by accident I find out that a full(er), albeit panned and scanned, version of ‘Sorcerer’ has been released in the States. Fortunately, my player is region 1 (this was in the days when region 2 DVD releases were minimal, vanilla discs nine times out of ten, far more expensive than their region 1 counterparts, and many of them were not even in widescreen). It’s quite expensive, but I can’t wait any longer. An order goes out to Play.com. Two weeks later it arrives. Luckily it’s a Saturday – no work. The disc goes in, the curtains are drawn, the Universal logo comes up. Little prepared me for what I saw. I wasn’t sure what to expect, given that Kermode’s one pager was the most I’d ever read about the film, and even that was vague enough to leave some huge question marks hanging over it. It made special mention of a scene involving a rickety rope bridge, but otherwise it didn’t really give me a clue as to what unfolds over the two hour running time.
But oh my fucking god.
To call it an endurance (for the audience) movie is an understatement – surely a contender for one of the most nihilistic films ever made, nearly all of the characters, lead and otherwise, are an amazing collage of unlovable bastards. The story does not allow for any heroism or redemption. The title is cryptic at best (it’s actually the name of one of the trucks). Most of the opening twenty minutes has little in the way of dialogue or exposition. The South American location and its inhabitants are so filthy you can almost smell it coming off the screen and you can’t help but feel like you need a shower after it’s finished. It’s scene after scene of misery. It’s certainly not first date material and, frankly, the whole thing makes Clouzot’s original look like a Disney film by comparison. No wonder it died at the box office.
It’s all about faces, you see. The film’s repeating theme is different faces – how they look, what emotions do they show, are they the “bad” guy or the “good” guy, how is the stress affecting them, what do they look like when faced with, or after, death. We start with four confident strangers, worried perhaps, but otherwise cool and calculated, three of them smartly dressed. By the time they’ve had their mishaps and have been in the village for some time and Roy Scheider wakes up surrounded by chickens wandering around in their own shit, old men coughing up lungs and amputees probably suffering from trench foot, our four anti-heroes are wearing months old clothes and have aged about twenty years. The toll the film takes on the audience is summed up by three separate close ups of faces – the first being a bride on her wedding day in the New York sequence. The bride and the wedding have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film, other than the ceremony happens to be taking place whilst Scheider’s crew are doing over the church. Friedkin, for some reason, holds on a close up of the bride in profile, a large bruise around her eye clearly apparent. The other two are close ups on Scheider’s already characterful face – the first when he looks at himself in the mirror after being in the village for a little while, worn, tired and fed up, the second when, nearing the end of his mission and being the sole survivor of the four, he has become a ghost in the clutches of near insanity. It’s a neat little reflection of what the audience feels during the film, how they’ve been tested by Friedkin’s all too realistic visuals.
And then there’s THAT punishingly tense sequence where the trucks have to drive over a breaking rope bridge which spans a river in flood, during a storm (see my avatar for a still from this scene). Clouzot’s original was known for its equally tense traversing of a rotting wooden bridge hanging off the edge of a cliff. In ‘Sorcerer’, though this scene appears, it’s almost an afterthought, with Friedkin saving all of his energy for the rope bridge. This sequence, bizarrely homaged in The Simpsons Mr Plow episode, is jaw dropping, even now – no CGI, no stuntmen, very little in the way of health and safety. No, Friedkin made his actors really drive the trucks over the bridge, which was really fitted with breaking wooden slats, with the trucks frequently achieving a forty five degree lean to one side. All that was keeping the bridge from really breaking were two steel cables running either side. Keeping the trucks on track was down to the drivers – Roy Scheider and Bruno Cremer. As I keep saying, if people like absolutely nothing else about the film, this scene alone is hard to criticise for realism, execution, acting (not that they had to act too much with all the chaos around them) and sheer gumption.
I won’t go into the troubled history of its making (I would say see the entry in my Box Office Bombs thread for that, but it’s not there any more) and its subsequent rediscovery, because I’ve probably already bored most people reading this, if anyone is. Instead I will simply urge everyone who hasn’t seen it to sit through it and experience it, even if you haven’t seen the original.
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FAVE FILMS
BO BOMBS
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Printable Version
RE: Great Badir's Favourite Films - 
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles (1971) 
The original is brilliant, first saw it only a year ago, and you cover everything I like about it in your review. Haven't seen the sequel, though.
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