Soft as Stone: A Look Back at Bad Boy Billy Friedkin's SORCERER

One Tough Job

What’s the toughest job you've ever worked? Construction? Landscaping? Chances are if you’re spending your free time reading cinema articles it’s neither one of those jobs. Personally the toughest job I ever had was a 3 AM to 3 PM stint at a vodka distillery. It was heavy wooden pallets, angry sounding machinery and sweat soaked shirts.

BUT…

William Friedkin quite possibly put the TOUGHEST OF JOBS to celluloid back in 1977 with his flawed masterpiece SORCERER.

Riding high off his massive success The Exorcist, Friedkin set out with a newly inflated ego to try his hand at French maestro Henri-Georges Clouzout’s Wages of Fear. Even for a young talented director cruising with the New Hollywood gang, deciding to remake a movie that helped kick off the New French Wave was a gutsy choice. But Friedkin was known for having gutsy tendencies.

The story follows four bad hombres who committed various crimes back in their home countries to eventually find themselves in the unsavory position of being stuck in the backwaters of a third world country. Each one mean and rabid in their own way, each one needing an escape back home. When a not-so-nearby oil drilling site blows up, a job opportunity presents itself; four men to drive EXTREMELY VOLATILE nitroglycerine filled boxes through the jungle, across rain beaten bridges, and over rebel infested land, to the oil site itself.

The men, with leading man/shark killer Roy Schneider, take the job in a heartbeat. What follows is a TENSE slow bone crushingly maddenning odyssey through the sweaty green inferno of the jungle. An easy parallel to what Apocalypse Now was going to be in a few years.

Early in the film Bruno Cremer snazzes himself up in his luxurious Parisian apartment while his wife reads him philosophical journal entries. A soldier sees an elderly woman making her way across his line of sight, and notes that with the gesture of his hand, cannons will fire and take her out of this world. He gives the command and asks…

“..and whose gesture will remove me?”

This parable emphasizes the idea of Sorcerer. Fate and chance. This same lobster eating French aristocrat eventually finds himself drenched in sweat and driving TNT across the jungle a few scenes later. How does one end up there?

In a film where the four men drive through a dense green jungle with death being a slight bump in the road, they’re left to the hands of chance and fate. It doesn’t matter where they’re from or how much money’s in their bank accounts, fate will take them all the same.

Sorcerer boasts some of the most intense set pieces ever shot from the 70’s , best known for a gut churning scene taking place on the world’s worst bridge. Scenes drop from 200 mph to an agonizingly slow and tense spectacle, each one outdoing the last. And the score by the neon soaked Tangerine Dream only drive the ethereal insanity deeper.

Often considered the film that hamstrung Friedkin, it’s cult has only grown since its opening night in ‘77. In a decade filled with Chinatown’s and Godfathers it’s easy to see how this one got swept to the forgotten dregs of great but unknown movies.

DOUBLE FEATURE PAIRING: Slap this next to a screening of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. SIMILARITIES: Both sweaty odysseys into the heart of man and how far one would go for a paycheck.