Roy Scheider goes on an existential voyage of the soul in William Friedkin’s SORCERER

SORCERER (William Friedkin, 1977)
Film Forum
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May 30 – June 5
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In the mid-1970s, Chicago-born director William Friedkin was riding high, earning an Oscar for The French Connection and another nomination for The Exorcist, two huge critical and box-office successes. For his next film, he decided to reimagine a seminal work that had had a profound influence on him, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s haunting 1953 suspense thriller, The Wages of Fear. “It turned out to be the most difficult, frustrating, and dangerous film I’ve ever made, and it took a toll on my health as well as my reputation,” Friedkin wrote in his 2013 memoir, The Friedkin Connection. Friedkin’s adaptation of Clouzut’s classic, itself based on a novel by Georges Arnaud, follows four unlikable men — a thief (Roy Scheider), a hit man (Francisco Rabal), an embezzler (Bruno Cremer), and a terrorist (Amidou) — hiding out under fake identities in a depressed, nowhere village in South America. When a nearby oil well catches fire, the company needs four men to drive two rickety trucks more than two hundred miles over treacherous terrain to deliver cases of rotting, highly unstable dynamite that will be used to blow the whole thing up and put out the fire. Oil man Corlette (Ramon Bieri) is sending two trucks — dubbed “Lazaro” and “Sorcerer” — because he thinks only one, if any, will make it through. The journey includes a harrowing twelve-minute scene as the men try to navigate a dilapidated rope bridge in a rainstorm as well as a psychedelic trip through a fantastical landscape (shot in the Bisti Badlands in New Mexico).

Harrowing bridge crossing is one of the most suspenseful scenes ever caught on film

What began as a dream project — Friedkin was pretty much given carte blanche by the studio, and he initially had his ideal cast lined up, consisting of Steve McQueen, Marcello Mastroianni, Lino Ventura, and Amidou — quickly turned into a nightmare as the cast changed, location problems flared up, a cinematographer had to be fired because of improper lighting, a narc forced Friedkin to get rid of some drug-using crew members, “Marvin the Torch” had to be called in to help with an explosion, and malaria ran rampant, as did the budget. When the film was finally released in June 1977, it got lost in all the Star Wars hoopla, resulting in a critical and box-office failure that shattered Friedkin, whose next three films were The Brink’s Job, Cruising, and Deal of the Century. But Friedkin has always stood behind Sorcerer: “I had persevered to make a film that I would want to see,” he wrote in his memoir, “a relentless existential voyage that would become my legacy.” After fighting for the rights to the film, he supervised a digital restoration that confirms the film as a towering achievement, a gripping, intense work of suspense that digs deep into the soul. Scheider, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The French Connection and then was extremely upset when Friedkin refused to cast him as Father Damien in The Exorcist, gives an extraordinary performance as Jackie Scanlon, a New Jersey Irish gang member now going by the name Juan Dominguez, ready to do whatever it takes to get out of the hell he is in. Friedkin and editor Bud Smith cut the film to match Tangerine Dream’s electronic score — the German group wrote the music to the script, without seeing a single frame of the finished product — creating an intense pace that never lets up. The digital restoration, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, was just released on Blu-ray and DVD, and is currently playing at Film Forum, restores Friedkin’s Sorcerer legacy, as critics and audiences reevaluate it as a remarkable triumph after all these years. The title is still terrible and the final scene highly questionable, but Sorcerer is an unforgettable, powerfully realistic work of magic.