Sorcerer (At Last)

Roy Scheider bemoans a fallen tree

I've wanted to see Sorcerer for nearly 50 years.  Last week, thanks to my son Daniel, it finally happened.

The film was released in June 1977, a little over a month after Star Wars.  It was directed by William Friedkin, who earlier in the decade had scored critical and commercial triumphs with The French Connection and The Exorcist.  The former won 5 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Friedkin, and Best Actor for Gene Hackman.  The latter only won 2 Oscars, but was a massive hit as well as a bona fide cultural phenomenon.  Friedkin was on a roll, poised to make his bid to be viewed as the decade's most successful director.  The trailer for Sorcerer began not with a scene from the movie, but a pointed reference to Friedkin's two earlier films.

Of course, we all know what happened.  It's not an exaggeration to call Sorcerer a legendary failure.  Maybe not quite up there with Heaven's Gate or Ishtar, but in that ballpark.  I really wanted to see it when it came out, and don't remember exactly why that never happened.  It could have been that my girlfriend at the time had film tastes that were roughly the polar opposite of mine; it could have been that I was working six days a week that summer.  In any event, the movie was gone from most theaters before the end of July, and more or less disappeared from public view for decades.

When I was at UC Berkeley (1980-82), one of the mainstays of the local movie-going experience was the UC Theater on University Avenue.  The theater showed a double bill every night (unless the movie was extraordinarily long).  Many of the films were past classics; many were second-run features whose first runs hadn't exactly set the world on fire.  Among the films I remember seeing at the UC were the Godfather movies, Body Heat, Thief, The Harder They Come, Rockers, Prince of the City, and Lancelot of the Lake.  I'm sure there were others.  But never Sorcerer.  Believe me, had they shown it, I would have been there with bells on.

It's been available on DVD for over a decade now, and I'm sure has been available on one or more streaming platforms during that time, so there's really no excuse for my taking so long to finally watch the damn thing.  As noted above, I have my son Daniel to thank for the opportunity, because he checked it out of the library and brought it with him during a recent visit.

And just as hoped for, it's great.  No question, a classic Seventies movie of the type that doesn't really exist anymore.  Dark, with deeply flawed protagonists, people who you end up rooting for even though they wouldn't be in the movie if they weren't a bad guy to begin with.  And the one thing one should always keep in mind when watching a Seventies movie is to never count on a happy ending.

Based on a 1950 novel by Georges Arnaud, Wikipedia describes the plot of Sorcerer as follows: "Sorcerer depicts four fugitives who are assigned on a dangerous mission to transport two dilapidated trucks 218 miles on a rough Latin American jungle road.  The trucks are loaded with old, rotting dynamite that "sweats" its volatile basic ingredient, nitrogylcerin, and the dynamite could explode if the trucks move too suddenly."  That leaves out quite a bit, but is a decent description to work from.

The movie's first act shows how the four fugitives end up at a remote village in an unnamed South American country, one where the conditions are horrific and the only work to be found is back-breaking physical labor at the behest of an American oil company (hey, some things never change).  The starting lineup consists of a small time hood who makes the mistake of being part of a gang which rips off a church bingo game that has a strong connection to the local mafia; a Parisian banker who flees France to escape a fraud allegation; a terrorist who participated in an attack outside of Jerusalem; and an assassin for hire.  

When one of the oil wells explodes and catches fire, the only way to put it out is to blow it out with dynamite.  Dynamite is available, but bringing with it problems that must be overcome - having been ignored during storage it is now highly unstable; and it also isn't located anywhere near where it is needed.  Hence the need for the trucks (which have to be built from scratch out of spare parts, more or less), and the need to carefully, slowly traverse a road/trail/path that makes the Road to Hana look like a well-manicured superhighway.  Recognizing that successful completion of an impossible task is their only ticket out of hell, the four fugitives begin their descent into a different version of hell.

Once the journey begins the tension is palpable, and the only release for the viewer is when you chuckle to yourself over being fooled (again) that the most recently overcome obstacle HAD TO BE the worst scenario that could possibly be encountered.  The movie's most famous scene is when the trucks have no choice but to navigate a suspension bridge built out of fraying rope and crumbling logs (something straight out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).  Your eyes and your brain tell you there's no way they can get across, and once they do you're still not sure what you've just seen.  But it works.   Almost as good is the scene shown in the photo above, when a massive tree blocks the entire road.  All the while, you watch but you know that none of this is going to end well; that this particular Seventies movie will inexorably move toward an ending that Sheila O'Malley called (in her excellent 2008 piece) "a horribly inevitable note." 

Aside from Roy Scheider, who said the shoot was more challenging than Jaws, there aren't many recognizable faces in the movie, although people of a certain age (say, 65) will almost certainly recognize Ramon Bieri, a character actor who appeared in just about every popular detective show on TV from the late 60s through the 70s.  Scheider is great, as he nearly always was - but so are the actors portraying his fellow fugitives: Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, and Amidou.

Sorcerer is as good as I had always hoped it would be.  It deserves to be a part of any conversation about the great Seventies films, and is one of Friedkin's very best.

Chuck Negron, R.I.P.

If you grew up in the late sixties/early seventies, you heard a lot of Three Dog Night - especially if you listened to music in the car or on an AM-only transistor radio.  TDN were one of the great AM radio bands of their day, and from around 1969 through 1974 there was rarely a time when one of their songs wasn't on its way up the charts, usually to the Top Ten and sometimes all the way to #1.  I'll be doing a deep dive on AM radio bands sometime later this year, so for now any discussion about the band's music can wait.

The subject for today is Chuck Negron, one of the band's three lead singers.  Negron died last week at the age of 83.  

I was a big TDN fan; and as far as I was concerned Negron with THE MAN.   Just look at that photo - that's Negron in the middle, with Cory Wells on the left and Danny Hutton on the right.  The two of them look OK, sure.  But Negron?  That is absolutely the coolest looking dude in the world.  We should all aspired to Negron-level coolness at some point in our lives.

It wasn't until I bought their Greatest Hits album in 1974 that I discovered that Negron sang lead on fewer songs than either Wells or Hutton.  That was disappointing, but Chuck did sing "One," a great Harry Nilsson cover, and of course the band's most famous song, Hoyt Axton's "Joy to the World."  When you hear "Jeremiah was a bullfrog," you're hearing Chuck Negron.  And something tells me we'll be hearing that song forever, so in a way Chuck Negron is immortal.

R.I.P.

The Amazing Mr. Alcaraz

Because of the enormous time difference between Melbourne and the United States (19 hours, if you live somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone), the Australian Open is tough viewing for American tennis fans.  The early rounds aren't too bad because there are plenty of matches that begin early enough in the day in Melbourne to land in prime-time viewing in California.  But once they reach the quarterfinals, you'd better be prepared to pull an all-nighter if you want to make it to the end of a match, particularly if it's a men's match that goes a full five sets.

This year, the men's draw began approaching the stratosphere in the quarterfinal round when Novak Djokovic get as lucky as you can possibly get in sports when his opponent, Lorenzo Musetti from Italy, was forced to retire with an injury early in the third set.  At the time his injury hit - it appeared to be late in the second set - Musetti was dominating the match.  It wasn't just a matter of Djokovic losing a couple of tough sets - he was absolutely being blown off the court, 4-6 and 3-6.  To his credit, he acknowledged how lucky he was to be advancing, sheepishly saying in his post-match interview that Musetti "should have been a winner today, no doubt."

As it turned out, that was just an appetizer for the semifinals that followed.  The first semi, Alcaraz v. Zverev, began around 8 p.m. California time, so it seemed like a match where I might be able to make it all the way through.  Of course, I had no way of knowing that it would turn out to be the longest men's semifinal in tournament history, clocking in at 5 hours, 27 minutes.  As he has been prone to in the early stages of his career, Alcaraz nearly fell to cramps in the third set (after the first two sets went to tiebreakers), and for a brief moment it looked as if he was heading to the net to shake Zverev's hand and call it a day.  But he toughed it out, adopting something akin to a tennis version of the rope-a-dope for the next set in order to save himself for the fifth.  To my discredit, I gave up on the match when Zverev went up a break in the fifth, thinking there was no way that Alcaraz could come back from that.  I was wrong.

There was never any question about trying to watch the Djokovic-Sinner semifinal, which I didn't feel too bad about because I assumed there would be no way, given the way he'd looked two days earlier, that Djokovic could possibly prevail against Sinner.  Wrong again.  My first hint out the outcome came at 6:26 a.m., when I glanced at my phone and saw a text from my friend Jeff, who was at the airport for the dreaded zero-dark thirty flight to Orange County: "Djoker is up a break in set number 5 against Sinner.  Amazing!"  And it truly was.  Never count a champion out, I suppose.

After those two matches - well over ten hours of tennis - the final couldn't help but be a little anti-climactic and it was, with Alcaraz prevailing in four sets.  Kudos to Djokovic for making another major tournament final at age 38.  The odds are probably against him winning another one, but it would be foolish to rule it out completely.

At this point, it's hard to imagine what the ceiling might be for Alcaraz.  At 22, he has won as many major tournament championships (seven) as John McEnroe did over the course of his entire career.  He still has issues with cramping, but he's already got the career slam so there's no question about his ability to play on any type of surface.  Whatever happens, it will be fun to watch.