Sorcerer is a 1977 action-adventure film, produced and directed by William Friedkin, starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal and Amidou. It is a remake of the 1953 French film Le Salaire de la Peur (Wages of Fear).
Sorcerer followed Friedkin's highly successful The French Connection and The Exorcist, but was a major commercial failure. The budget was estimated at over $22 million, a substantial sum at the time. With a reported gross of $12 million,[citation needed] the film did not recoup its costs. The film was co-produced by Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, with Universal handling U.S. distribution and Paramount handling the international release.
Sorcerer is notable for its electronic score by Tangerine Dream, which was the group's first Hollywood film score and led to its becoming popular soundtrack composers of the '80s.
Plot Summary
Four international criminals on the run from the law hide out in a remote village in Venezuela whose economy is dependent on a major oil company.
An oil well over 200 miles away has caught fire and can be extinguished only with explosives. The criminals are given a chance to earn a great deal of money, no questions asked, by driving trucks carrying unstable dynamite to the blaze. Because they were improperly stored, the sticks are now "sweating" nitroglycerin and could detonate if subjected to shock or vibration.
Driving in teams of two, they meet various hazards on their journey, including a rope-suspension bridge swinging violently in a huge storm over a flood-swollen river, a massive tree blocking the road, and a number of desperate, dangerous bandits.
Cast
Production notes
Steve McQueen was the director's first choice for the role eventually taken by Roy Scheider, a small-time criminal named Jackie Scanlon who ends up a fugitive from the law and the Mafia after a robbery of a New Jersey church. McQueen loved the script but didn't want to leave the country or wife Ali MacGraw at the time.
Charles Bluhdorn, whose Gulf+Western conglomerate owned Paramount, was passionate about turning the Dominican Republic into a movie-making mecca. Friedkin insisted the film be shot in the Dominica, so McQueen asked if MacGraw could be a producer (giving her a reason to be on location with him). Friedkin refused, so McQueen turned down the role. The director regretted his decision years later, realizing that McQueen's star power might have made it a box-office success.
Production notes on the Universal DVD release (1998) tell a different story, noting that the casting of Scheider as Scanlon/Dominguez was a "foregone conclusion" and "the ideal (perhaps the only) choice for the role" since Friedkin had directed him previously in The French Connection.
Friedkin had serious issues beyond the clashes between him and the cast and crew. He reportedly did not enjoy his time during the section of the film shot on location in Israel. He also antagonized Paramount, using a Gulf & Western corporate photo for a scene that featured the evil board of directors of the fictional company that hired the men.
Many point to the film's commercial failure as a result of the movie being released concurrently with George Lucas' runaway box-office smash of 1977, Star Wars. Friedkin agreed with this assessment during an interview on the Bug DVD.
In Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which documents the film's development from start to finish, a story is told of a theater in San Francisco doing historic business with Star Wars, only to draw tiny audiences when Sorcerer replaced it for one week. Friedkin's movie was yanked and Star Wars returned.
Scheider was angry that in the final cut Friedkin removed a subplot that showed his character in a more sympathetic light; it involved him befriending a small boy from the village. For that reason, Scheider consistently refused to comment on the film.[citation needed]
The film's title refers to one of the trucks, which has the name "Sorcerer" painted across the bonnet (the other is named "Lazaro"). There is no supernatural or magical character or event. This caused confusion (and walk-outs) among audiences at the time of the film's release since Sorcerer was marketed as a follow-up to Friedkin's wildly successful occult-themed film The Exorcist.
According to Friedkin, the title fit the film's general theme: "The Sorcerer is an evil wizard and in this case the evil wizard is fate. The fact that somebody can walk out of their front door and a hurricane can take them away, an earthquake or something falling through the roof. And the idea that we don’t really have control over our own fates, neither our births nor our deaths, it’s something that has haunted me since I was intelligent enough to contemplate something like it."
Some newspaper ads included a line: "Not a film about the supernatural."
In an interview with Robert J. Emery (as part of The Directors series), Friedkin says that he wanted Spanish actor Francisco Rabal for the role of the "Frog One" in the French Connection because he loved the performance of Rabal in Luis Buñuel´s Belle de Jour. But the casting director mistakenly got Fernando Rey instead. Rey's performance ultimately was highly praised by the director and critics. It was not until Sorcerer came along that Friedkin and Rabal finally worked together.
Legacy
Despite its being one of the most infamous financial flops of the 1970s, it gained a cult following from pay television showings in the 1980s, and was finally released to VHS and DVD in the 1990s.
The film today is more positively received by film critics; Rotten Tomatoes gives the film 77% fresh on its Tomatometer.[1]
Film critic Roger Ebert lists the film at #9 on his ten-best films list of 1977.
Parodies
An episode of The Simpsons titled "Mr. Plow" featured a parody of this movie as Homer crosses a rickety bridge. The short scene is scored with very Tangerine Dream-like music.[2]
DVD release
The DVD has been released in the U.S. and Canada in a non-widescreen version, which is not its original theatrical aspect ratio: it was shown in cinemas at a ratio of 1.85:1. During the 1980s and 1990s, like Stanley Kubrick, Friedkin consistently claimed that he preferred the home video releases of his films to be presented in the fullframe format[3]. However, since widescreen televisions have become popular, Friedkin has allowed many of his other films to be released on DVD in their original widescreen formats (The French Connection, Cruising, To Live and Die in L.A.), and therefore it is possible that Friedkin's position on this issue may have changed.
Currently, there are no plans for a newly remastered release; however, Friedkin's controversial 1980 film Cruising was issued as a deluxe DVD in 2007, with Friedkin indicating that Sorcerer might get the same treatment at some point.
References
External links
