Sorcerer

William Friedkin’s tense remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic Wages of Fear (1956) is one of the great works of the New Hollywood movement. However, it remains relatively obscure, despite its towering ambitions. This is probably because it’s such heavy going. The mood is one of relentless torment, so not really a date movie unless one or both of you are mental. But it is an important movie and a mesmerizing one at that. Before the juvenilezation of Hollywood by Spielberg and Lucas, there was Sorcerer, a film of rare and courageous power. In many ways a companion to the later, insanely driven Apocalypse Now, we follow a group of desperados stranded on the borderlands of oblivion, never certain if they are moving toward or backing away from destruction. The film’s failure was probably down to Friedkin’s inability to pull back, his curious lack of subtlety. Luckily, in Sorcerer, his aggressive style found its true home.

To extinguish a refinery fire, four hopeless men stranded in a squalid South American town are hired by an oil company to transport two truckloads of highly unstable nitroglycerine over two hundred miles of treacherous mountain terrain. If the men succeed—if they manage to survive—they will be paid enough to escape the town: a hot, wet pocket of hell where the shit has piled high. These guys are carrying a load and we are made to feel the weight of it. The film is part of an established tradition of masochistic movies, stretching from A Man Escaped to Papillion and from Umberto D to Tzameti — films that bank on our deep fascination with, and vicarious enjoyment of, suffering.

As bad as Clouzot could imagine things, Friedkin has made them that much worse—his capacity for nightmare deeper still. Don’t approach this film looking for narrative, there isn’t one. The men need to get from one place to another, that’s it. The pleasure, if you find any, is in experiencing the journey with them. It’s an uncomplicated story that uses it’s simplicity as a means to focus on the individuals. But there’s no characterization, so don’t snoop around for any of that, either. The film rejects analysis, so elemental are Friedkin’s designs. He wants you to fee it, and feel it you do. In this way it’s more of a horror, colluding with that genre’s will to disturb. There’s one scene in which the trucks have to cross the most unstable looking bridge you’ll ever see. Friedkin does nothing flashy here: shots of splintering wood, sweating brows and the raging river beneath. He creates the tension and it’s ours to suffer. Stripped down to the essentials, the characters and simple narrative spit and crackle under this pressure.

Sorcerer depicts the ultimate repression of the body and soul, where anything but what is required means certain death. The men move toward the fiery depths as if toward salvation. This is something Coppola would explore a few years later, along with the notion that the jungle is the ultimate terrain of self-discovery, and destruction. However, unlike Coppola’s meandering jamboree, Friedkin doesn’t let anything out of his tight grasp. There’s the road, and nothing else. No playboy bunnies, no LSD. What you see really is what you get, but the men dare not close their eyes for a second—and neither do we.

The lead role was originally written for Steve McQueen but Friedkin refused to expand the small part of the bar girl to incorporate Ali McGraw. Frightened that a year in the jungle would destroy his marriage, McQueen passed. Although he has always regretted ditching him, the director made the right choice: these men long ago abandoned notions of love, their affection is only for escape. Hot from Jaws, Scheider came on board and is absolutely terrific. Poised to strike, he is the embodiment of bitter discontent. The rest of the cast, particularly Bruno Cremer as the suave, doomed Serrano, are pitched just right, framing their characters with the freedom of the damned. But Friedkin never quite allows them the camaraderie of Clouzot’s band of ruthless jokers, keeping the reigns tight and the tension high—they are outcasts until the end.

To gain Clouzot’s permission to remake the film, Friedkin promised that it wouldn’t be as good as the original. It’s not easy to say whether or not he kept his promise, and I suspect he did his best to break it, but it certainly attacks the narrative more ferociously. The film is not an exercise in cynicism, rather it celebrates the dogged heroics of the human spirit and the will to go beyond the point of no return. It’s just a real fucker getting there.