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William Friedkin’s ‘Sorcerer’: Cautionary Tales Have Rarely Taken Such an Amazing Artistic Form
posted by MonrovilleSTAFFMOD on August 24, 2023 at 1:31 AM
I’m very happy when films I’ve made are still recognized by whomever decades after they were made, but for most part you make films for a contemporary audience, the great William Friedkin recently told us in an exhilarating interview.
This respected filmmaker’s statement inexplicitly concerned Sorcerer, his 1977 existential thriller that had the misfortune of hitting theaters at the same time as George Lucas’ Star Wars, a film that Friedkin claims changed everything and a point in Hollywood history that many critics and analysts see as a starting point of the new blockbuster era, which marked the end of the New Hollywood cinema movement. Initially conceived as a small film with the budget of mere 2,5 million dollars, developed as a stepping stone for Friedkin’s next big project, The Devil’s Triangle, Sorcerer grew into a 22-million-dollar beast that failed to justify its expenses at the box office. History has been far more kind to the film that Friedkin considers his most personal one, as Sorcerer is nowadays hailed as a true masterpiece and one of indisputable classics of a dying era. A reimagination of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer features the story of four characters in charge of transporting two trucks full of nitroglycerin to a remote oil well. These people are difficult to sympathize with: portrayed as neither heroes nor villains, they are flawed individuals in a dire situation over which they have literally no control. Their lives are ruled by chance and fate. It is the latter which the puzzling title of the film refers to: the evil wizard playing with people as helpless puppets is actually fate, as Friedkin nicely put it, waiting around the corner to kick you in the ass. Even more significantly, the main theme is easily related to the political situation of the seventies, as well as it’s hardly preposterous to link it to the contemporary barrel of gunpowder the world has turned into: the characters, who have hardly anything in common, are forced to collaborate, overcome their differences and, concerned with the common good, repress their primary selfish preoccupation with their own well-being. A simple, yes, but beautiful and highly effective metaphor Friedkin manages to employ without ever leaving the impression of artificial moralizing or high-horse didacticism.
Written by Walon Green, whose work on The Wild Bunch Friedkin allegedly admired, based on Georges Arnaud’s ‘Le Salaire de la peur,’ shot magnificently by John M. Stephens and his predecessor Dick Bush, abounding in fantastic scenery and breathtaking landscapes, greatly enriched by Tangerine Dream’s electronic score, and presenting a rock solid performance by Roy Scheider, Sorcerer is a masterful presentation of impressive filmmaking abilities that turned William Friedkin in one of the most cherished auteurs of the last half a century. “Life is actually a beautiful gift, but people regard it not as something that is vulnerable, but as something that they take for granted. The major powers in the world just keep threatening each other, attacking each other, and there’s going to come a point where there’s enough nuclear proliferation to destroy the world,” Friedkin told us. Cautionary tales have seldom taken such an amazing artistic form.
A monumentally important screenplay. Dear every screenwriter/filmmaker, read Walon Green’s screenplay for Sorcerer. Based on the novel ‘Le Salaire de la peur’ by Georges Arnaud. Newly remastered Blu-ray under the supervision of William Friedkin is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
“I had seen The Wages of Fear and I thought it was a great film. It was really a theme about brotherhood. You had four guys, total strangers to each other, hated each other, and had to cooperate with one another or die. Make a last stand together or die. And I thought that this was really a metaphor for the world, for all the various nations of people who hated each other, yet had to find a way to live together, or perish. This theme should be continuously revived and presented to an audience. So I didn’t want to remake Wages. I wanted to take that theme and do a new version with my own kind of spin on it that was based on the Georges Arnaud novel. I just thought it was another interpretation of a great classic.” —William Friedkin, Hollywood Flashback interview, 1997
Selected by Friedkin as his personal favorite, Sorcerer tells the story of four unfortunate men (Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal and Amidou) from different parts of the globe, forced by their various misfortunes to work in a dangerous oil-drilling operation in South America. After an industrial accident, these outcasts are given the opportunity to earn enough money to escape this situation if they undertake a perilous mission of transporting crates of unstable high-explosives through 200 miles of treacherous jungle terrain in two ancient trucks. The film has been lauded by critics as an overlooked masterpiece and was nominated for an Academy Award for best sound. Following an introduction by DGA Special Projects Committee Chair Jeremy Kagan, Friedkin spoke about the film he has called the most difficult movie he ever made; discusses the ambiguous moral situation in Sorcerer, challenging audiences to root for the main characters with villainous backgrounds; explains his intentions behind using flash-frame cutaways towards the end; and traces his path from making The Exorcist to Sorcerer, and the new theme he wanted to explore —An Evening with Director William Friedkin
A few months after its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the restored version of William Friedkin’s resurrected masterpiece Sorcerer was screened in Paris at La Cinémathèque Française as the opening film of the 2nd edition of ‘Toute la Mémoire du Monde,’ an international festival devoted to recently restored films. Among the topics discussed during the masterclass, the director tells how and why Steve McQueen, Lino Ventura and Marcello Mastroianni got in and out of the project, how Star Wars ruined the potential success of Sorcerer, how difficult the shooting was (“It was life threatening; almost everyone on the crew got sick. I myself got malaria.”), how demanding he is as a director (“Come on! Do I seem tyrannical?”), how he sued the studios to get his film back (“I did not sue them for money. I will never make a penny out of this picture.”) and how he worked on the restoration of the movie (“It took me about six months. Six months of my own time, and I lovingly restored every single frame of that picture…”). —William Friedkin’s Sorcerer Celebrated In Paris Before Its Worldwide Release
“I wanted to make an action-adventure film that had a more profound meaning, like the mystery of fate, and that’s what Sorcerer’s about. It’s about the mystery of fate, and purgatory, and redemption, and in contemporary terms. I felt that the story embodied in The Wages Of Fear, the French novel and the film, fit that template very clearly. I wanted to do a version of it, in the same way that if someone does a version of Hamlet on the stage, it’s not a remake, it’s a new production, a new interpretation. And that’s how I did it: I changed all the characters, I changed all the incidents, but kept the spine of the original framework of the story, because I thought it was timeless. I had no interest in doing a remake or a shot-for-shot or anything like that, but I love the premise, the essential premise of four strangers who mostly didn’t like one another, delivering a load of dynamite, and they either had to cooperate or die. And that seemed to me like a metaphor for the world situation—even more so today.” —William Friedkin on Sorcerer, his career, and fate
At some point in pre-production for Sorcerer, William Friedkin had the French comic illustrator Philippe Druillet do some concept sketches for the trucks. What he came up with hardly looks like something you’d see in a film committed to authenticity and realism, but it’s cool stuff. —Toby Roan, The Sorcerer Blog
Probably the oddest thing about the Sorcerer/Druillet connection is that the commercial failure of the film in 1977 has often been laid at the door of Star Wars, the advent of George Lucas’s dismal saga being regarded, with some justification, as the opening of the gate to the barbarian hordes. (Friedkin’s film might also have fared better had it not been titled as though it were an Exorcist sequel.) The irony here is that George Lucas happened to be a big Druillet enthusiast, although there’s little evidence of this in his films; in addition to writing an appreciation for ‘Les Univers de Druillet’ in 2003, he also commissioned Druillet to create a one-off piece of Star Wars art in the late 70s. Knowing this it’s tempting to imagine Lucas creating a very different kind of science-fiction film in 1977, one with some Continental weirdness at its core. But when the world has already been deprived of Jodorowsky’s Dune it’s best not to dwell too much on might-have-beens. —John Coulthart
“What I did in Sorcerer makes Jaws look like a picnic… The stuntmen complained because the principals were doing all the stunts, but that’s the way Billy Friedkin makes movies. The most dangerous scene I’ve ever shot was the one where we were driving across a rope suspension bridge in a horrible storm and we kept swaying back and forth, back and forth. What the audience will see on that screen is what really happened.” —Roy Scheider, Sorcerer Star, Talks Of Thrillers, January 21, 1977
“I was rehearsing to stay alive… When we got to the Dominican Republic, I appreciated all that practice back in the States. Billy’s approach to Sorcerer ruled out rear-projection or trick photography. The actors, the vehicles and the terrain were too closely integrated into the composition of each shot. So what you see in the film is exactly what happened. When I take a mountain road on two wheels, on a road with potholes the size of shell craters, that’s the way it was. No one but Billy Friedkin could have persuaded me to take the insane chances I did. But when it was over and I looked at the rough footage I knew it was worth it.” —Roy Scheider
“We finally got so deep in the jungle that the crew had to build its own roads. Then we chewed them up with the trucks. Years from now, some geographer will have one heck of a time trying to figure out who built all those roads going nowhere… and why.” —Roy Scheider, The Henderson Home News, September 29, 1977
“In the ’70s I only made, like, three films, and if we talk about them—The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer and, later, Cruising. That had Al Pacino. It could’ve been De Niro. I liked his work in the ’70s very much, but I only made those few films and they took up every day of my life! I would love to have worked with De Niro back then, without a doubt. It’s not simply that you like an actor; you have to have a role for that particular actor. And I simply didn’t do that many films. The guy I really wanted to work with other than anyone was Steve McQueen, and I almost did on Sorcerer, but for a variety of reasons we couldn’t get together. The script was written for him.” —William Friedkin
“Walon Green wrote the Sorcerer screenplay for Steve McQueen to play the Scheider role. We sent it to Steve and he called me and said, this is the best script I’ve ever read. I love this picture. Then, he said, there are a couple of things I need you to do for me. I know you want to go out to some jungle and shoot it and I can’t do that because I just married Ali McGraw and she has a career. Can you write a part in there for her so she can be with me when I’m shooting this? I said Steve, you just told me it was the best script you ever read. There’s no major role for a woman in there. He said, okay, I get it. Then why don’t you make her a co-producer? I said Steve, I’m not going to do that, I don’t believe in that sh*t. And I certainly don’t want to schmuck bait your wife and call her a producer because she’s not going to be a producer on the film. And he then said okay I understand that, then let’s make it all in America. I said, Steve I’ve found the locations and I’m committed to them. I don’t want to do it in America. Because of those three reasons, he decided to pass.
I’ll admit something. If that came up today, I would have done anything he wanted. I was so arrogant at that time. I thought I was the star of that film. So I didn’t think that a close-up of Steve McQueen was worth a shot of the most beautiful landscape. A close-up of McQueen was worth more. When McQueen dropped out, I lost Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura, who were big European stars and were known in America as well. Only my arrogance cost me that cast.” —William Friedkin, ’70s Maverick Revisits A Golden Era With Tales Of Glory And Reckless Abandon
Reply by genplant29
on August 24, 2023 at 2:06 AM
Hi, Monroville.
I have no familiarity with the films you create your threads about, but nonetheless want to give you props and say excellent, impressive job you do writing and presenting your interesting, intelligent, detailed posts/topics!
Reply by Monroville
on August 24, 2023 at 2:11 AM
Don't give me too many props... quite a few reviews are indeed genuinely from myself, but I like to post relevant articles that movephiles might find to be interesting. I am more of a searcher and collator than an inventor... that is why I post links to the article's original source: to give credit where credit is due, so one can peruse the source at their leisure, as well as search the origin site for more movie information.
It is a shame what happened with IMDB obliterating the Talkback section, but fortunately we now have TMDB to compensate.
Speaking of which... (just added the link to the source)
PS: over on The Internet Archives, someone created a "fan edit" of the 1981 92 minute Wages of Fear re-edit that Warner Bros. did behind William Friedkin's back to more closely resemble the original film, and in a desperate hope to recoup the loss during the initial release in 1977. I cannot say that I like it better than Friedkin's original cut, but I do like it as much but in a different way... I wrote a review explaining more in depth my feelings directly after watching it on the site.
PPS: in the "Backdrops" section here, I included a screen capture of Pazuzu's cameo.
hmm.. after watching the Wages of Fear edit, right before they drive off, Serrano (Victor Manzon) wishes Dominguez (Jackie Scanlon) "Good Luck". Dominguez says "Go to Hell, Serrano" and hands him something.. it's the chalk he used to scribble the "218" miles above the mileage indicator on "Lazaro's" dashboard. I wonder... did Dominguez unintentionally "curse" Serrano by scribbling the Pazuzu figure on Serrano's truck? All Black Magic promises wealth and power at spiritual expense.
Hmm.. I guess the movie earns it's title after all. Sorcerer doesn't refer to the truck.. it refers to Roy Schieder.
Reply by genplant29
on August 24, 2023 at 2:15 AM
Keep up the great work!
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on August 24, 2023 at 9:42 AM
Hey @Monroville thanks for posting this delightful article on Friedkin. It prompted a stream of thoughts!
I've always heard that the beginning of the summer blockbuster era was Jaws (1975). I'll come back to this in comments below...
Those who know me by now will be familiar with one of the main inspirations for my building my movie ROI database — to clarify the inelastic relationship between movie quality, revenue, and profit. Great films don't always make a lot of money, and movies that make a lot of money are not always great. This seems yet another fine example of the former.
@rooprect (a user here on TMDb) recently mentioned in another thread that movies with a voice are more likely to be remembered, while movies made for the sake of superficial entertainment are less likely to be remembered. It appears Sorcerer is taking its rightful place among the former.
As we often discuss here in TMDb, and as discussed across the cinesphere specifically and the world of art in general, artists (writers, directors, actors) have voices, and use their voices once in a while to say something that they feel is important. They use their medium with craft, symbol, allegory, art. It boggles my mind when people dismiss what the movie makers themselves say about the movies they make just because it does not jive with their personal views or agendas.
At any rate, there's no ambiguity about Friedkin's intentions and ambitions for this project.
So, Roy Scheider is the lead in this movie. Most remember him from Jaws. Interesting that there was a connection to Jaws in the production of Sorcerer, yet they still see Star Wars as the tipping point.
The director of Jaws, as everyone knows, was, of course, Steven Spielberg. Recently, Spielberg was heard telling Tom Cruise "You saved Hollywood" or "You saved the industry" or words to that effect, upon the success of Top Gun: Maverick. What's Tom Cruise noted for? Doing his own stunts. That element was deeply baked into Sorcerer but still isn't the sole determinant of box office success.
Two comments about this.
First, it seems Friedkin was more focused (obsessed) with making art, rather than making money. There is being true to one's vision, and then there is also doing solid business. It's possible that, had he met McQueen's demands, the movie might have been more successful, but we'll never know. Clearly, the movie he completed is a critical success, box office be damned, and that's probably the better result anyway.
Second, the problem with Steve McQueen, aside from his being a scumbag, was that, apparently, he was also poison on set. From this article The heart-throb who hated women: Wife-beater, drug-taker and relentless philanderer, the brutal truth about Steve McQueen comes this quote: "On nearly every film that he made, he fell out with the director or the screenwriters or his co-stars — and sometimes all of them at once." (there's lots more to discover about McQueen in that article, but this isn't really about him, so the digression must end here!)
Reply by Monroville
on August 24, 2023 at 3:23 PM
Jaws was the impetus for the "blockbuster", much like how Risky Business was the impetus for Tom Cruise's career: "Okay, that was one fine movie/performance... but let's see where this leads." When Star Wars and Top Gun came out (for each point respectively), that was when people knew that "this is going to be a thing." You are always going to have that first person to do something that everyone else might feel tentative about.. until another person shrugs their shoulders and follows their lead.. nothing bad happens.. maybe even something good.. more people take the chance, and before you know it, (insert Gary Oldman meme here) EVERYONE is doing it! Or at least trying (I'm looking at you, Starcrash)
I have always held on to the belief that adults are just wrinkly kids, for better or worse. We never really leave Grade School or High School.. the pettiness, the rivalries, the fun times and trivialities follow us to the grave.. it's just that the richer and wrinklier people get, the bigger the scope of the Veruca Saltiness gets.
Friedkin's problem (as well as a lot of directors) is that he could not interconnect the commercial side of filmmaking with the artistic side. It is the belief that you are either true to your art, or you put a big, fat "For Sale" sign on your forehead and be a studio's puppet.
I never knew McQueen was such a bastard. You should look up Robert Blake's autobiography, specifically when he talks about Electra Glide in Blue. Boy, is that a good read! I'll have to see if I can find that article.
EDIT: found it! I'll post it on the Electra Glide in Blue thread and link it here. Trust me, you'll want to read it.
Regardless, glad to help keep the faith in films alive!
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on August 24, 2023 at 4:03 PM
Well captured! I've observed this with modern horror. There was the "demon/devil child" era that arguably started in the late 60s with Rosemary's Baby, and then took off in the 70s with The Exorcist, and The Omen — lots of plot, character arcs, A-list actors...then came the faceless slasher beginning with Michael in Halloween 1978 (1974's Texas Chain Saw Massacre was ahead of its time yet) and coming to bloom with Jason in Friday the 13th and Freddy in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Yep.
He's also an interesting character, indeed. If you do find it, please circle back.
Thank you for your contributions to making TMDb a great place to talk movies — looking forward to reading more of you!
Reply by Monroville
on August 24, 2023 at 6:40 PM
Believe it or not, I think that all Slashers came from the Italian Giallo, which in turn came from murder mysteries like Sherlock Holmes. There is an evolution of sorts: I imagine people like Mario Bava grew up watching the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, thinking "What if you could show the hounds attacking people? What if you amplified what was suggested into something even more suggestive?"
And so you get movies like Blood and Black Lace and eventually Bay of Blood, which apparently was a big "inspiration" to the creation of Friday the 13th. If you watch The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as well as the rest of Dario Argento's "Animal Trilogy (of Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Cat O'Nine Tails)" they are essentially visually stylish murder mysteries which combine a quasi musical element (not quite people breaking out in song, but definitely underpinning the importance of music in helping to convey a mood or telling a story without dialogue) as well as "showing you the goods" (aka various depictions graphic sex and violence), themselves brought in after the US and European governments allowed news agencies to show the graphic violent aftermath of torn, blasted bodies from Vietnam. I'm sure you've had numerous movie men say "If the news can show the real thing, why is the government going to care if we fake it?"
Thus Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch ushered in the advent of more adult naughtiness that was previously censored or simply not shown due to decorum or what could be considered just simply "good taste". People were getting a good peak into "Pandora's box", and now that there was little to no push back with censorship, audiences wanted to rip the lid off.
It is from those Giallos ("yellow" in Italian, for the color of fear) that you had quasi documentary horror, like Deranged and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both films based on necrophiliac Ed Gein and coming out in the same year of 1974. Followed by films like Black Christmas (again in 1974?! Damn, what a year for horror!) the "American Giallo" was established and cemented.
But it wasn't until Halloween (1978) by John Carpenter that horror finally had it's equivalent of Star Wars, which both created an entire genre of rip-offs, themselves a kind of rip-off of a multitude of ideas condensed into everything pure about film. I should point out that while the Italians and docuhorrors of the 70's should get a lot of credit, one movie seems completely forgotton in it's long lasting effect on modern horror: Westworld.
The modern (or at least modern as a term for "anything made from the mid 1970's to today") horror genre owes a great deal to Westworld's "Gunslinger", played by Yul Brynner. The idea of a pithy, even silent killer who is slow but steady, relentless and unstoppable; the focus on the main protagonist as target/sacrifice.. notice how the Gunslinger kills all bystanders with extreme accuracy, while purposefully missing Richard Benjamin's character just to let him know he will kill him when he's ready); the 2 or 3 failed attempts at stopping the killer until fire is used (be that which roasts chestnuts or that which comes from Loomis' gun).. even then, there is always the anti-climax "jump scare" as a reminder that you might never truly defeat evil.. all you can do is delay it. I also found it interesting how the Gunslinger's face falls off at the very end, with the idea that true horror is the destruction of individual identity, which resides in the face.
Think of Michael Myer's "facelessness" and almost robotic, focused relentless, or the Terminator's.. all due to Yul Brynner's performance.
If you look at all modern horror, they either all wear masks (Jason, Michael, Leatherface, The Predator), they are missing their face (Freddy, Chucky) or they have no face to begin with (The Alien, The Thing, the leper ghosts from The Fog).
It seems the problem with Post Millennial horror is that they forgot their roots. The Slashers are boiled down Giallos, with either the most meager mysteries to back up the justification for the murder set pieces or no mystery whatsoever, and the rest simply toss out even all of that just to deal out pain to victims like dealing out cards in a deck.