Riding high after the success of The Exorcist and The French Connection, Friedkin obliged both Universal and Paramount (with additional money from his own purse) to mount a nihilistic and philosophical remake of a great French noir (Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear), without big stars and with a very complicated production. Nobody thought this a good idea. From a commercial perspective, they were right: Sorcerer is one of the radical, stubborn and gifted auteur’s big flops. From a cinephilic perspective, however, they were wrong; it is perhaps even more powerful than the original. The story of four men fleeing from themselves, driven by an obsession for money, and sucked into the quicksand of a crazy endeavour, is closer to the cinema of von Stroheim and Herzog than the New Hollywood of the 1970s. The cast (Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, Amidou) more or less reflects Friedkin’s authorial spirit, an exotic mix of European and American cinema in the midst of a South American no man’s land. Shot in the Dominican Republic where it is 40 degrees in the shade, Sorcerer revolves around a theme that suggests that the film is actually about itself: to drive two trucks full of nitroglycerine without letting them explode (the scene in which they traverse an extremely fragile rainlashed rope bridge is legendary, a metaphor for the production which was on the verge of collapse). Set reports recalled those of Apocalypse Now: actors struck down with malaria, clashing temperaments, furious rows between the director and crew, and directors of photography fleeing midshoot. In the end, though, everything detonates on the screen. Sorcerer resembles a furious implosion, a self-destructive adventure in which Friedkin identified with the undertaking to such an extent that he considered it existential. The feverish and hallucinatory atmosphere is enhanced by the music of Tangerine Dream, an electronic group who would subsequently lend their unsettling style to other filmmakers intolerant of Hollywood’s rules (such as Michael Mann in Thief).

Roy Menarini