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.