The following notes on William Friedkin’s Sorcerer were written by Lance St. Laurent, PhD candidate in Film in the Department of Communication Arts at UW – Madison. Sorcerer screens on Friday, February 7 at 7 p.m., following a 4 p.m. screening of Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear. Both movies screen in our regular Cinematheque venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission to both screenings is free!
By Lance St. Laurent
There are few premises as immediately grabbing as that for Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel The Wages of Fear. Four men, down on their luck and washed out in South America, take on a job that only the desperate or insane would dare attempt. An American oil well ignites into a rampaging fire, and the only way to stop it is to blow up the well. The problem? The well is located deep in the jungle across perilous terrain, and the only explosives in the area are boxes of unstable, nitroglycerin-leaking dynamite located over two hundred miles away from the well site. The four men must load up two trucks with the volatile cargo—one a backup in case of (likely) explosion—and haul it ever-so-slowly to the well site, aware at every moment that any stretch of bumpy road or unaccounted obstacle could mean certain obliteration.
With such a logline, it’s unsurprising that Arnaud’s novel was quickly adapted in his native France. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 adaptation was a critical and commercial hit upon release and remains the best-known version of the story even today, canonized as one of the best European films of the 50s and cited by filmmakers and historians alike as a landmark of the thriller genre. However, such a high bar couldn’t deter brash American filmmaker William Friedkin from taking his own stab at the material. After the Best Picture winning The French Connection (1971) and the record-smashing success of The Exorcist (1973), Friedkin was riding high. In search of a new project worthy of his newfound cachet, he eventually landed on a reimagining—he insists it is *not* a remake—of Clouzot’s classic.
For Friedkin, the film presented an opportunity to create an “existential thriller”, citing John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as an important touchstone. He saw the story’s central premise as “a metaphor for the warring nations of the world” and in adapting the original story infused this multicultural metaphor directly into the text. In Clouzot’s film, the men behind the wheels of the trucks are all Europeans and given limited backstories, enough to understand their desperation but little in the way of their lives before. In contrast, Friedkin (and writer Walon Green, best known for The Wild Bunch) flesh out the circumstances that led all four men to South America, opening with a globe-trotting sequence that establishes each of our four protagonists as contemptible in their own special way. Nilo is a hired assassin working out of Veracruz, Mexico who pitilessly guns down a target. Kassem is a Palestinian resistance fighter, the lone man to escape the clutches of the IDF after orchestrating a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem. Victor Manzon is a Parisian executive accused of financial malfeasance. With the walls closing in around him, and his business partner dead by his own hand, he flees his country, leaving behind his wife in the process. Finally, Jackie Scanlon is a wheelman for the Irish mob forced to lay low and hide from the Italian mafia after a robbery and getaway job goes south.
For his foursome, Friedkin envisioned an all-star international cast. He offered the role of Scanlon, the crew’s lone American and the ostensible lead of the film, to several Hollywood leading men, including Steve McQueen and Robert Mitchum – both of whom declined due to the demanding overseas shoot. After a suggestion from Universal’s Sid Sheinberg, the film secured Roy Scheider for the role, a Friedkin alum from The French Connection now at the height of his popularity after the runaway success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. European idols Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura also also declined the roles of Nilo and Manzon respectively, with Friedkin instead opting for Spanish actor Francisco Rabal and Bruno Cremer, both making their Hollywood debuts. Of his originally envisioned cast, only the mononymic Moroccan actor Amidou came aboard, signing on for the role of Kassem, the group’s explosives expert.
Another of Sorcerer’s major departures can be heard in the score—a driving, hypnotic series of electronic compositions from German band Tangerine Dream. After attending a performance, Friedkin reached out to the group, asking them to supply music based solely on their impressions of the script. The band sent a two-hour tape of original compositions. This tape would not only serve as the final score for the film but also served as inspiration in post-production, supplying rhythm and structure to which Friedkin would match the film’s edit. Sorcerer was the band’s first Hollywood film score, but the choice turned out to be forward thinking on Friedkin’s part. In the subsequent decade, Tangerine Dream’s slick, synth-heavy scores for films like Michael Mann’s Thief, Paul Brickman’s Risky Business, and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark would come to define a sound inextricably associated with Hollywood cinema of the 80s.
Production, primarily in the Dominican Republic proved long and laborious, particularly due to multiple complex sequences that led to delays and a ballooning budget. Chief among these is the film’s centerpiece bridge sequence. The rickety rope bridge set—complete with extensive hydraulics—cost $1 million to construct and was forced to be disassembled and moved at great expense to Mexico after the originally designated Dominican river dried up from lack of rain. Despite the great difficulty, Friedkin regarded (and continued to regard until his death) the film as his best work.
Unfortunately for Friedkin, few agreed with him. Critically, the film was met with vitriol, with Andrew Sarris calling it “a visual and aural textbook on everything that is wrong with current movies.” Box office returns were even more dire, with the film grossing less than $10 million worldwide against its $22 million budget. Instead, audiences worldwide were in the thrall of Star Wars, the smash hit that crystallized the blockbuster culture that Friedkin’s own Exorcist in part inaugurated. Lucas’s success with spectacle and fantasy at the expense of Friedkin’s gritty film was so stark, in fact, that retrospective accountings have lumped Sorcerer along with other high-profile flops like Heaven’s Gate and One from the Heart as indicative of the downfall of the so-called “New Hollywood”.
Despite its initial struggles, Sorcerer has enjoyed a reappraisal in recent years, particularly after a restoration and release in 2013 put the long-unavailable film back in circulation. Now available to a wider audience, new and old fans alike—including prominent artists such as Quentin Tarantino and Stephen King—shared appreciations and reevaluations of the film, praising its high-wire tension, pitiless storytelling, and borderline surreal final act as Scheider’s Scanlon mentally unravels. While the film may not yet be regarded as the magnum opus that Friedkin considered it, by his death in 2023, Sorcerer had made the long, perilous journey from discarded film maudit to cherished cult classic.