William Friedkin’s Sorcerer has a subtle but powerful reputation among cinephiles. A relatively little-known movie from the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist that flopped hard at the box office (to be fair, it was overshadowed by the mania that was Star Wars just a month earlier) and with critics of the time; but those who have seen it in the years since have sung its praises so adamantly and so often that it’s hard for even fairly casual movie-literate fans not to have heard of it by now. The film is particularly noted for its suspense, and for its eye-catching poster depicting a truck weighing down a precarious rope bridge in the middle of a jungle. On a slightly more obscure level it’s known for a chaotic production in the Dominican Republic that could almost rival Apocalypse Now. Sorcerer is mostly a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear -itself of course a world cinema classic- and this too was weighed against the movie when it came out. But it perhaps has more in common, both in production and theme, with Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (as well as perhaps more curiously, Fitzcarraldo -which would come out several years later).
Needless to say it is the most ambitious movie the late Friedkin ever attempted -with its international cast of characters brought to Colombia, each escaping criminal consequences in their home countries, united in a tense and deadly journey through uncompromising wilderness. The four protagonists are tasked with transporting extremely volatile dynamite to an exploded oil well across hundreds of kilometres of dense jungle terrain. Even the most minor of accidents could cause it to go off and kill any or all of them.
Each has their own backstory. The main American Jackie is played by Roy Scheider as a riff on Humphrey Bogart’s character in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre -a desperate and melancholy mob goon in hiding from a rival gang after a botched hit in New Jersey and an accident that left him the only surviving perpetrator. Bruno Cremer’s Victor is a French businessman on the hook for massive fraud, who escaped to South America after seemingly running out of financial safeguards. Amidou’s Kassem is a Palestinian militant, who like Jackie is in hiding from the IDF after they killed or apprehended all of his colleagues for a bombing in Jerusalem. And Francisco Rabal’s Nilo is just a mysterious Mexican contract killer.
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Theirs are additionally a powder-keg of personalities through this endeavour, always threatening to boil over alongside the nitroglycerin. And Friedkin illustrates well each man's casual distrust of the others -the animosity Kassem bears towards Nilo for killing a friend (a likely Nazi in hiding), or Jackie's determined control of the vehicle over Nilo. It exacerbates the stakes of the mission, much as the environment may do the bulk of that. Establishing shots of dense, impenetrable rainforest give way to excruciating obstacles. The big one is of course that rotted rope bridge the trucks have to get across in pouring rain -and one has to admire the practical filmmaking techniques of the 1970s (or just Friedkin's personal insanity) for making such a sequence real, and without stuntmen for the actors. Later, the need to get rid of a tree in their path evokes similar tension -especially in the choice to break out some of the unstable dynamite to blow it up. A lot of things blow up in this movie, in some of the great firestorm explosions I've seen on-screen.
The eerie music that accompanies much of this by Tangerine Dream contributes a lot to the effect as well. The title is a bit nebulous (and ultimately proved a big marketing hurdle), but that score really does relate a preternatural grimness that such a title and its chaotic font evokes. The natural elements are bearing down in provocation on these man-made tools of devastation -something's got to give. And that is what Friedkin most succeeds at getting across through his subtle mastery of tone.
It's a very dim movie, as many of Friedkin's are, this theme on a kind of fateful natural power rising over and eventually beating any human resilience. On at least some level Friedkin hates all four of his protagonists -when death comes for a couple of them it does so in a mocking way, disrupting a single beat of sentiment in rejection of any modicum of sympathy. They are all ethically dubious people and yet they are also all victims of chance, though Jackie especially. And nothing will ever go right for them even as they push through impossible circumstances. This is a cold movie that posits an innately cruel and arbitrarily vengeful world -by his own admission Friedkin's view of the world.
In that sense, Sorcerer may be the overarching personal statement for its auteur director -and whether you see it as brutally earnest or cynically overwrought, it is still conveyed compellingly.
Criterion Recommendation: Lost Horizon (1937)
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Under-discussed I feel as both a Hollywood adventure classic and a Frank Capra movie, Lost Horizon is one of the great truly escapist movies of its era. In that it literally presents a fantasy of escaping the world to a sequestered ageless utopia. The first and best adaptation of the novel by James Hilton, which introduced the paradisical realm of Shangri-La deep in the Himalayan mountains, it follows a group of men recently engaged with a war surviving a plane crash and being rescued by the denizens of the secret valley, wherein of course the main figure, a diplomat played by Ronald Colman, also falls in love with a local teacher played by Jane Wyatt. Capra regulars Thomas Mitchell and H.B. Warner also feature, as well as Sam Jaffe as Shangri-La’s leader. Fitting the mould wonderfully of the classic adventure story that spurs the imagination, it is a very fun movie that Capra puts a lot of energy into -in fact it went over-budget, and much like Sorcerer failed to initially earn back its high cost (it eventually evened out on re-releases). It’s world is delightfully realized though, in mood as well as aesthetics -Capra conveying a real otherworldly and emotional power of place he never got to in any of his other films. An overlooked gem of the classic era, and one that I think Criterion should really check out.
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