Sorcerer was meant to be a modest, low-cost production; a filler between The Exorcist and a big-budget project called The Devil’s Triangle which was intended to capitalise on the former’s box office supremacy. The very idea of a remake of H.G. Clouzot’s nihilistic masterpiece being realised effectively on a moderate budget should have rung alarm bells from the start, and possibly did, but Friedkin was Hollywood’s golden boy thanks to the phenomenal two-for-two of The French Connection ($75 million box office from an approximate $2 million budget) and The Exorcist (a $411 million return on the studio’s $12 million investment).
For anyone not familiar with it, The Wages of Fear, adapted from a novel by Georges Arnaud, charts the misfortunes of four expatriates of various nationalities who have fetched up in a shithole town in South America where a U.S. oil company is the only employer, the heat is oppressive, personalities clash and tempers flare. An out of control oil well fire a couple of hundred kilometres away risks the oil company’s profits and the most immediate solution is to pay four locals to drive two trucks loaded with unstable TNT to the site (one way of tackling an oil fire is a controlled explosion which robs the conflagration of oxygen); the money men’s reckoning is that it’s a suicide mission and one HGV/crew is essentially expendable. Cue fuckloads of location shooting and scenes of white-knuckle tension fit to make Hitchcock look like a slacker.
The Wages of Fear cost the equivalent of over half a million dollars in 1953, a huge budget for a French studio at the time. It was inevitable that Sorcerer would never be done on the cheap. It was inevitable because staging big, extended set pieces costs money. It was inevitable because location shooting in Veracruz, Jerusalem, Paris, the US and the Dominican Republic costs money. It was inevitable because a driven perfectionist like Friedkin was calling the shots. The budget quickly spiralled to $22 million. Studio heads had conniptions. The Devil’s Triangle went by the board.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll not wade through the minutiae of the troubled production. Anyone who has read Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders Raging Bulls will know what I’m talking about. Anyone who hasn’t is urged to do so immediately: it’s a jaw-dropping book and the passages about Friedkin and Sorcerer are the most jaw-dropping of all.
It finally opened in 1977 to reviews that ranged from cautious to negative. It opened against Star Wars. It bamboozled audiences with a lengthy opening sequence comprising four seemingly unconnected vignettes. Fifteen minutes elapsed before any English dialogue was spoken. People walked out. Its title was a synonym for wizard or magician and it was by the director of the most successful horror movie of its time … and yet it was about oil well fires and trucks loaded with TNT and there wasn’t a hint of the supernatural anywhere. Nor did it retain the title of Clouzot’s original, not that The Wages of Fear would necessarily have rung the brand recognition bell for mainstream audiences. People stayed away. Or went to see George Lucas’s space opera instead.
Sorcerer flopped.
Rights issues didn’t do it any favours in the rediscovery-on-home-media stakes. Readers of Biskind’s book would be forgiven for pegging it as a bloated vanity project. Clouzot aficionados turning their nose up at the idea of a brash American remake would certainly have found enough in Sorcerer to fuel their prejudice (though it’s anybody’s guess what they’d make of Howard W. Koch’s quick-off-the-blocks 1958 remake Violent Road or Julian Leclercq’s 2024 Netflix production, which is notable for retaining Arnaud and Clouzot’s title but little else beyond that).
So how does Sorcerer hold up fifty years later? In the interests of fairness, I watched Sorcerer without re-approaching The Wages of Fear (which I’d not seen in maybe twenty-five years) first, and only watched Clouzot’s film once I’d consolidated my immediate take on Sorcerer by sketching out the basics of this review. And as much as I’d liked Sorcerer (the rope bridge scene literally had me on the edge of my seat, legs crossed, hands bunching into fists and unclenching again, heart pounding), taking in The Wages of Fear two days later it was obvious which was the superior version.
Still, Friedkin – who sought Clouzot’s blessing in making Sorcerer, even though it was novelist Arnaud who still owned the film rights, and dedicated the film to Clouzot – does enough that’s different to put his own stamp on things.
Clouzot lets his quartet of … I hate to say heroes or even protagonists, so let’s go with studies in failure … stew in the sweltering heat and antagonist atmosphere of Las Piedras, a desert town about as welcoming as Hartlepool during a particularly biting economic downturn, for a solid hour. Desperation is dialled up to the max. The ugliness of masculine behaviour is pinned out as if for an autopsy. Before he’s even delivered the first of several excruciating suspense scenes, Clouzot has conducted a thorough investigation into empty machismo, toxic masculinity and the fragility of the ego. Friedkin’s vision of the poverty-stricken South American town as his characters’ own personal hell is undoubtedly visceral, but he takes the first half hour of Sorcerer’s 121-minute running time to get them there, then seems to be in an inordinate hurry to bundle them into the trucks and get them on the road.
Briefly, and in order of their introductory vignettes, professional assassin Nilo (Francisco Rabal) pulls off a hit in Veracruz and makes good his escape; PLO member Kaseem (Amidou) pulls off a bombing in Jerusalem with a group of comrades whose escape is hampered by the swift response of the IDF – Kaseem alone evades them; Victor (Bruno Cremer) gets pulled in by the president of the Paris Stock Exchange and quizzed about 15 million francs that have disappeared on his watch, is subsequently left with his dick in the wind when the business partner he is dependent upon to pay back the collateral commits suicide, and goes on the run; and small time mobster Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider) and his crew pull off a robbery on a church which goes south when a priest is gunned down and even souther still when they realise the church has ties to a Mafia operation and even southerer yet when the getaway ends with their car wrapped round a fire hydrant and the cops descend – like Kaseem, Jackie is the only one who makes a clean break. But with a price on his head.
So, yes, the stakes are high for each of the foursome already, but not enough time is spent mapping out interrelationships or observing the minutiae of life in said hellhole. For men desperately not wanting to be found, their sudden need to get out of the place isn’t given enough weight. That said, at a good thirty minutes shorter than The Wages of Fear, getting them freighted up and rolling before the hour mark isn’t necessarily a bad decision.
What is a bad decision – or rather a weird one – is the sequence where they have to rebuild a couple of trucks in a scrapyard before setting out. Clouzot simply has the oil company kick out a couple of HGVs. Friedkin’s proto-A-Team scene undercuts the urgency of the mission somewhat as well as nudging things into the arena of improbability. I can buy that Kaseem would have some mechanical knowledge and Scanlon maybe did some tune-ups before a life of crime beckoned, but the ability to rebuild a truck? And as for impeccably dressed hitman Nilo and soft-handed financier Victor, I doubt either of them would know one end of a socket wrench from the other.
Finally in the negative column we have the casting of Scheider. This is the criticism virtually everybody makes when discussing the film, and I hate to labour the point – particularly as Scheider, to be fair to him, works like hell to try to carry Sorcerer. You can see him giving it his all in every scene. But the fact remains that he’s wrong for the role. Friedkin originally wanted Steve McQueen, then considered Robert Mitchum, Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson, all of whom passed. Warren Oates was in the frame at one point (and I could weep to imagine how awesome he’d have been) but it was felt he wasn’t enough of a “name”.
But things are as they are, and the dream cast of Sorcerer (Friedkin also wanted Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura as Nilo and Victor respectively) was not to be. What Friedkin did achieve, however, is a level of tension across an entire hour of screen time that is every bit the equal of The Wages of Fear.
As his big set piece, Clouzot gives us a wooden trestle built out over a sheer drop on a mountain pass, onto which the trucks must back up in order to manoeuvre around a section of closed road. Friedkin’s equivalent is the painfully slow crossing of a rope bridge, one crew member driving, the other guiding him. Rain hammers down; the river rages, almost threatening to wash the rickety structure away. The passage of the first truck shreds your nerves. The second picks up the pieces and shreds them even finer. It’s as good a set piece – if not better – than The French Connection or To Live and Die in L.A.’s car chases. Those are urgent, propulsive and exciting; Sorcerer’s bridge crossing is immersive, ratcheting the tension up with every passing second.
The other big showy sequence common to both films is the dynamiting of a road blockage: a boulder in The Wages of Fear, a fallen tree in Sorcerer. Here, Friedkin has the edge. Always at his best when visually demonstrating the mechanics of things – the logistics of drug smuggling, the rite for exorcism, the technique of counterfeiting money – Friedkin is in excelsis, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue with anyone who wanted to claim the scene as better than the bridge crossing.
Friedkin also finds a different route (pardon the pun) to the same conceptual ending as Clouzot: that fate is always waiting, just round the corner. But on his way there, one truck and one driver remaining, he makes a ghostly detour through the landscape of a mind in torment and a nervous system thrumming within a millimetre of breaking point. It’s quite unlike anything Clouzot has to offer and it’s arguably the film’s most purely Friedkin moment. Anyone who walked out of a screening back in 1977, their expectations of a supernatural epic crushed, should have stuck around: Sorcerer reaches its bleak denouement by way of a scene shot through with something unforgettably haunting.
Neil Fulwood
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