Sorcerer (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced and directed by William Friedkin; written by Walon Green, based on Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear; cinematography by John M. Stevens and Dick Bush; edited by Bud Smith; production designed by John Box; art direction by Roy Walker; music by Tangerine Dream; starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, Amidou, Ramon Bieri, Peter Capell, Karl John, Frederick Ledebur, Chico Martinez, Joe Spinell, and Rosario Almontes. 4K UHD + Blu-ray combo edition, color, 121 min., 1977. A Criterion Collection release.

I vividly remember my first viewing of William Friedkin’s mighty Sorcerer at a Boston theater, early in its initial run in 1977. The picture’s eponymous truck, loaded with nitroglycerin that could obliterate everything in sight if a bump in the jungle roadway set it off, was crossing a wooden bridge so rickety, wobbly, and dilapidated that just looking at it made you dizzy. Rain poured down on the tilting, swaying planks as the driver advanced the vehicle inch by agonizing inch—and the film abruptly jammed in the projector, prompting a vociferous collective groan from the audience (including me) as the image vanished and the screen went dark. The projectionist repaired the damage, the movie picked up from where it had left off, and I’d acquired a permanently heightened awareness of how truly mesmerizing a powerfully presented action scene can be.           

Yet, even as this happened, ironically enough, Sorcerer was on its way to becoming a box-office fiasco, abruptly reversing the momentum Friedkin had built with The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), two of the era’s most smashing hits. Its reputation has more than recovered in subsequent years, and extras on the Criterion Collection’s definitive new edition show the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola, and Nicolas Winding Refn enthusiastically singing its praises. Friedkin himself calls it the production he’d most like to be remembered by (if he’s remembered at all, he modestly adds). He also calls it the most difficult of his career, which is easy to believe, since various accidents and illnesses cropped up in the far-flung locations where it was shot, and lighting the jungle for the camera proved so thorny that a second cinematographer had to be imported. Considerable drama had transpired when Henri-Georges Clouzot shot The Wages of Fear, the first version of the 1950 novel of that title by Georges Arnaud, but the Sorcerer cast and crew faced even greater challenges. 

Friedkin took pains to insist that Sorcerer is not a remake of Clouzot’s picture. A new production of Hamlet isn’t a remake, he reasonably says in Francesco Zippel’s 2018 documentary Friedkin Uncut, the longest of the Criterion extras; rather, it’s a new “vision” putting a fresh spin on the original. Fair enough, even if the Shakespeare comparison is a bit high-flown. But every iteration of this tale unfolds the same basic narrative: four deprived, despondent men strive to earn desperately needed money by delivering explosives to the site of a raging oil-field fire. Like the original novel, Clouzot’s version concentrates almost entirely on the moment-to-moment events of the torturous drive, whereas the Friedkin version gives a good deal of backstory, telegraphed in a series of quick, punchy scenes that amount to the sort of prologue often favored by this director. Scanlon (Roy Scheider) is a petty New Jersey gangster who needs to scram when a robbery (of a church!) goes badly awry. Nilo (Francisco Rabal) is a suave hit man in hiding after a successful assassination job. Kassem (Amidou) is an Arab terrorist who facilitates a bomb attack in Jerusalem and needs to flee the Israeli forces who have killed or caught the others involved. And the elegant Victor (Bruno Cremer) is a financial fraudster whose chicanery is swiftly catching up with him. All end up in an isolated Central American village from which they’d do pretty much anything to get away. Hence their agreement to pilot two dynamite-laden trucks along more than two hundred miles of preposterously hazardous roadway.

Suspense aplenty is built into Sorcerer, so explaining the film’s box-office failure has occupied many a commentator. According to one theory, its somewhat murky title bears some of the blame—what kind of movie gives a truck a name like Sorcerer and then names itself after the truck? That notion is too simplistic for me. It’s true that Friedkin chose the title partly on a whim, borrowing it from the 1967 album by Miles Davis that he was listening to a lot while preparing the production, but it carries deeper significance as well. “A sorcerer is an evil wizard,” he says in a 2015 conversation with director Nicolas Winding Refn, included on the Criterion disc. “And in the film I thought the evil wizard was fate that controlled the lives of all these people, no matter how heroic or terrified or adventuresome or desperate they were. Their lives were out of their control, which is what I think about all of us—we have nothing to say about how we come into this world and nothing to say about how we’re going to leave it. That’s the [film’s] underlying theme of sorcery…The Exorcist was about the mystery of faith, and now I wanted to make a film that had no supernatural element but was about the mystery of fate,” reflecting the idea that “we have no control over our destinies.”

That’s hardly an optimistic message, and the downbeat vibe could have hurt the picture’s prospects in 1977. Ditto for the downbeat politics that filmmaker James Gray notes in another Criterion extra, saying that Gabriel García Márquez’s great 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude strongly influenced Friedkin’s thinking about the exploitation of Latin American populations. Hence the starkly portrayed misery of the native residents in the film’s fictional town, who despise the local dictator and react with horror to the sight of bodies hideously burned in the oil-field fire. The despotic energy company “runs the town, it owns the town, it owns everybody,” Gray says, “and you cannot escape that.” Seeing people as “subject to larger forces of economics and history and culture…is very antithetical to the American dream,” he remarks. “It’s not easy to tell people there’s no real hope.” Friedkin claimed he never thought about the politics of his films: “Other people read things into them,” he says in Friedkin Uncut, “but I don’t approach cinema from a political position at all.” Yet while his views of the human condition are more philosophical than ideological, he consciously sneaked some mischievous politics into Sorcerer, where a photo on a wall of the oil company’s office displays the faces of the board of directors of Gulf & Western, the very company that owned the Paramount studio, which joined Universal to finance the film. Attacking corporate hegemony was popular in Sixties and Seventies counterculture, Gray wryly observes, but Hollywood was less than fond of it. 

One more reason for the film’s financial failure was its audacious refusal to offer the audience anything like a good guy to root for. Every significant character is some sort of scoundrel, and even Scanlon and Nilo’s truck has a monstrous look, thanks to production designer John Box, who gave it a grille like a menacing mouth and headlights like malevolent eyes. Glimmerings of bravery and decency occasionally show through, in keeping with Friedkin’s overall distrust of clear-cut moral boundary lines—since every personality contains a mixture of good and evil, he tells Refn, absolute heroes and unalloyed villains are make-believe (and movies about superheroes are “pornography”). Yet he had done mighty well with unsympathetic characters in The French Connection, and now he wanted to go further still, asking viewers to jounce along with rogues, ruffians, and losers for two rough-riding hours. He might have pulled off the trick if not for the paradigm-shifting impact of George Lucas’s phenomenal Star Wars franchise, which unveiled its first installment four short weeks before Sorcerer opened, instantly making wholesome derring-do in outer space more fashionable than suffering and cynicism in the jungle. What worked for The French Connection in 1971 went very much against the grain in 1977: Sorcerer took people over a mountain, screenwriter Walon Green says, quoting Friedkin in a Criterion extra, but suddenly they wanted to go over the moon. 

The interview extras on the Criterion disc give plenteous information about how Sorcerer reached the screen, and some of it is surprising. Friedkin’s first choice to pen the screenplay was Terrence Malick, according to Green, who got the job instead, working closely with Friedkin on one scene at a time. The casting also changed considerably in the preproduction period. The key role of Scanlon was written specifically for Steve McQueen, whose aversion to excess dialogue partially accounts for the film’s emphasis on spectacular visual storytelling. McQueen adored the script, Friedkin says, but wouldn’t sign on unless his wife, Ali McGraw, could be involved—playing a character, being an executive producer, whatever—or unless the picture were shot in the United States so he and McGraw could be together. Friedkin rejected these demands, decided McQueen was dispensable, and recruited Scheider, whose stardom had risen with The French Connection and skyrocketed with Steven Spielberg’s 1975 megahit Jaws. (Speaking in Friedkin Uncut, though, Tarantino calls Scheider a weak link, saying the Sorcerer part called for someone with “bigger shoulders.”) Other first-choice actors were replaced by alternatives for assorted reasons: Marcello Mastroianni was having child-custody problems with Catherine Deneuve, and Lino Ventura wouldn’t take second billing to Scheider (although second billing to McQueen would have been okay). The final cast is first-rate in every way except top-level marquee value, and the shortage of Hollywood stars was another likely reason for the shortage of ticket sales. 

What impresses me most about Sorcerer today is its most obvious and admirable trait—its astonishing realism, which retains every bit of its potency in Criterion’s meticulous 4K and Blu-ray transfers. Friedkin believed that every good movie is a sort of dream, and even this one eventually develops hallucinatory overtones, when Scanlon is measurably near the end of his rope and the landscape takes on a surreal, even phantasmagorical look. The score by Tangerine Dream contributes to this effect throughout the story, sometimes intensified by near-subliminal animal cries on the soundtrack. However dreamlike it gets, though, the picture as a whole is steeped in the unsparing physicality enabled by arduous labor in formidably challenging locations; it was shot largely in the Dominican Republic, where Gulf & Western and Paramount chief Charles Bluhdorn had extensive holdings (remarkably, film editor Bud Smith reports that principal photography was accomplished in a short six weeks). Friedkin took great pride in the authenticity captured by his six busy cameras, although he tells Refn he would happily have used computer-generated imagery if such a thing had existed at the time. And a certain amount of trickery was involved—some of the rainfall was optically enhanced, for instance, and the trucks were covertly attached to the teetering bridge, which had a hidden hydraulic system beneath it. Still and all, to my eyes Sorcerer exceeds even the rightly celebrated naturalism of Clouzot’s 1953 masterpiece, and it puts the much-praised riskiness of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) in the shade.

Other super-ambitious epics surfaced in the Seventies, and Sorcerer has been compared to Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Those are great and enduring achievements as well, and they far exceeded Sorcerer for immediate prestige. But half a century later Friedkin’s film is riding high. “To the end,” critic Justin Chang writes in Criterion’s program essay, “Friedkin maintained that he never made a greater film…. To the end, he was right.” He certainly was.

David Sterritt, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, is author or editor of fifteen books on film.

See also the author’s review of the new Criterion Collection 4K UHD + Blu-ray edition of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear in the print edition of the Fall 2025 issue of Cineaste.

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