Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News
Service, Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World,
Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others.
He is the founder and editor of Movie
Nation.
The
stumbling French Netflix remake of “The Wages of
Fear,” a 1953 thriller by Henri-Georges Clouzot,
whetted my appetite for re-watching that touchstone tale
of desperate men taking on a suicidal job, each for his
own grim reasons.
But
none of my streaming services have it available. Max has
it, I think Criterion restored it and has it
on their channel. So I went in search of the second famous
version of that classic story, William Friedkin’s
epic “Sorcerer,” a 1970s updating that is
as bathed in lore as any movie of that era.
Friedkin’s
budget-buster opened a month after “Star Wars,”
and the Internet is filled with hot-take reviews (many
of them “performed” on youtube) about “the
best movie you never heard of/saw” and the like.
“Sorcerer” exists in a few versions, never
got that much attention when it came out, and Friedkin
lamented its fate every chance he got, right up to his
death last August.
Poking
around, I found a full-length cut used on European TV
online and dove back into this world. Because if nothing
else, “Sorcerer” is a half hour shorter than
the original “Wages.”
“Sorcerer”
is a film greatly-enhanced in memory by its signature
scenes, down-and-out men driving huge, beater ten-wheeled
trucks loaded with volatile nitroglycerine over an ancient,
rickety rope and wooden plank bridge in the middle of
the South American jungle. That iconic image made one
helluva poster. I used to own one.
But the movie’s biggest failing, highlighted by
the latest French adaptation, may be relying too much
on the structure of the source novel. What we remember
is the movie that begins roughly half an hour AFTER Friedkin’s
movie’s limited (title and two distributing studios)
opening credits.
Friedkin spends a lot of screen time and travel money
taking us from Veracruz to Jerusalem to Paris and then
downmarket New Jersey to introduce the four men who wind
up driving those trucks. One (Francisco Rabal) is an assassin.
Another (Amidou) is a survivor of a Palestinian team that
blew up an Israeli bus. A third is a French banker (Bruno
Cremer) whose life and lifestyle are a fraudulent house
of cards he flees rather than take a colleague’s
way out — suicide by pistol in his Porsche in the
parking lot of a swank restaurant.
None
of these sequences are in English, and none are subtitled.
Bad move.
The
fourth character is the wheelman (Roy Scheider) for a
low rent Jersey mob, guys who rob Catholic priests counting
all their parish’s Sunday offering one ill-advised
afternoon. One of those priests happens to be another
mobster’s brother.
It
takes over 16 minutes for Friedkin to let us meet our
leading man, Scheider, 16 minutes for him to abandon the
challenging (you can still follow it) opening episodes
that have foreign dialogue and no subtitles translating
it.
And
while those introductions “explain” how these
mugs landed some place in the no man’s land of southern
Panama/northern Colombia, and contain some action (the
bus bombing and man-hunt, the Jersey robbery and botched
getaway), those explanations are utterly unnecessary.
Add
in ten minutes of how the distant oil well blows up, the
time/cash pressures of “the company” dumped
on an in-country engineer (Ramon Bieri), and Friedkin
has dawdled away a quarter of his movie before getting
to anything resembling “the story.”
This
blunder, repeated in the new Netflix version and borrowed
from the even longer 1953 French film and thus obviously
taken from the novel, strips away the mystery of the anonymous,
lost-on-purpose men drinking in a muddy cantina in the
middle of nowhere where no one could find them.
Henri-Georges
Clouzot should have watched how B. Traven and John Huston
set up “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”
(1948). Don’t over-explain. But if you want to establish
that one man’s a killer, one’s a driver and
another a bomb maker, let us glimpse their background
in tiny doses in flashbacks.
“Sorcerer”
truly gets underway with the offer of enough money to
maybe escape this hellhole, just for risking your neck
for cheapskate capitalists.
“You
read about this place in travel brochures?”
“I
heard it had a healthy climate.”
The
half-spoiled-by-the-heat-and-damp nitro is selected as
the quickest/cheapest way to blow out a wellhead fire.
It can’t be transported by helicopter. Too much
vibration. “Too dangerous.”
So…they
decide on ancient, beaten to death trucks to cover 218
miles of swamp, mountain and mud roads? As if that won’t
be even bumpier? “Sorcerer’s” “Marxist”
anti-capitalist theme is expressed in that decision. It’s
cheaper to pay locals a pittance to try and survive a
trek in barely-running trucks than it would be to do things
safely.
The
“driver’s test” comes first, winnowing-out
any candidate who isn’t deft at driving a stick
and handling a hulking cargo carrier.
“Teamster?”
the guy trying to pass himself off as “Juan”
something or other (Scheider) is asked.
“Greyhound.”
The
drivers are picked, and there’s a mad scramble to
scavenge parts from a long line of rusted-out hulks to
get two trucks in shape to make the journey. Not sure
how a banker is supposed to know how to work on a gasoline
engine (the trucks sound and smoke like diesels), set
the valves and whatnot.
The
pencil-thin mustached assassin Nilo (Rabal) is a last
minute replacement. And they’re off, facing rain,
ruined pigpath roads, roadblocks, natives in open revolt
against the government and that signature bridge of despair.
Despite
all the “introduction” the characters are
given, we don’t really “know” them and
the performances have a “just get through this just
like this poor sap I’m playing” doggedness.
The
conflicts come from predictable places. The men are rivals,
and there isn’t a lot of compassion, because if
only one truck or even one driver makes it, he gets everybody’s
“share” of the cash on offer.
Considering
how little we ever “know” these guys, why
waste all that screen time “starting” their
horrific “adventure?”
One
of the most interesting pieces of lore about the film
is how that prologue was chopped out and some of the scenes
establishing how each man ended up in the jungle were
sampled as flashbacks, all of it done by the film’s
European distributor without the filmmaker’s knowledge.
Friedkin rightly raised hell about that much shorter “International
cut,” but that distributor was onto something. That
structure works to better effect in many a thriller.
This
isn’t Scheider’s best performance, or for
that matter Friedkin’s best film, no matter the
degree of difficulty it took to make it.
Filmed
mostly in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, the “legend”
of “Sorcerer” is that it is a Hollywood “Fitzcarraldo,”
an “Apocalypse Now” without Vietnam combat,
a masterpiece and an epic undertaking about which we say
“They don’t make’em like that any more.”
very
time I see a digitized automobile flip over a just-ducking
Tom Cruise or some other impossible “stunt”
created on a computer, I think of “Sorcerer.”
That damned bridge was built, with cables tightened and
loosened to make trucks teeter to the brink of tumbling
off it.
While
“Wages of Fear” is still considered the greatest
man’s man action thriller of them all, I’d
say “Sorcerer” has turned out to be more iconic.
Watch
any trek-by-vehicle movie and they’re imitating
“Sorcerer” more than “Wages of Fear.”
Whole “road trips” on TV’s “Top
Gear” and “The Grand Tour” have been
homages to this film, and other TV shows imitate them
imitating “Sorcerer.”
Friedkin
insisted on calling this his “greatest film,”
in some sort of “Look what they did to my masterpiece”
Orson Welles spin. It isn’t. He made “The
French Connection,” “To Live and Die in LA,”
“Killer Joe” and “The Exorcist,”
for Pete’s sake. And he was the one who insisted
on those ill-advised opening episodes that cripple the
picture.
But
“Sorcerer” is still important, iconic and
damned suspenseful when it works. Just don’t confuse
what’s memorable about it — an image that
can summed up in one great poster — for the movie
building up to that, and struggling to an anti-climax
after it.
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