Last week, Friedkin's Sorcerer finally came home in a special edition digibook blu-ray.
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| "Roy Scheider...you kill my mother. She was a shark. Now you WILL die!" |
Three years after the 1973 worldwide box office smash 'The
Exorcist', director William Friedkin set his sights on a project as ambitious
in scale and personal in scope as anything yet attempted in Hollywood: a remake
of the 1953 French thriller 'The Wages of Fear' by Henri-Georges Clouzot and
ferocious beast of a film called 'Sorcerer'. The setup is exceedingly simple: four criminals in hiding accept a
grueling and suicidal job of carting nitroglycerine through a precarious and
dangerous terrain on two barely functioning trucks, with the promise of great
fortune if the task is completed. In
both the original film and Friedkin's reinterpretation, it's an exercise in
white knuckle tension with the fate of the men's lives on the balance as they
tightrope walk their way through one death defying obstacle after another.
Originally
titled 'Ballbreaker' (the studio nixed that title immediately), 'Sorcerer' is
metaphor for fallen, lost souls trying to redeem themselves from the Hellscape
they find themselves in, and the simultaneous futility of trying. It's also a critique of avarice and the
depths to which people will dive out of desperation driven by the almighty
dollar. In a positively mortifying
sequence, the men elect to drive their ticking time bombs across a
deteriorating and unstable suspension bridge.
Anyone in their right mind would look at it and refuse to accept the
situation, but we're watching people who have long since passed the realm of
reason and rationale and we instinctively fold our arms tight as they charge
full steam ahead into almost certain death.
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| "Pull it up....just a little more..." |
Using
techniques that would become commonplace in the suspense thrillers from Steven
Spielberg, Clouzot and Friedkin's films zero in on rickety wooden slats on a
bridge giving way, screws becoming undone, rope pulleys tearing, tires getting
stuck, and intense close-ups of the grimy faces of men in the grip of
terror. Sound is essential in both films
to ratchet the stomach churning tension, with many scenes playing without the
aid of music to relieve our tightly wound nerves. The new found (at the time) German electronic
band 'Tangerine Dream' provide a brooding score full of dread and unease,
foreshadowing the terrors ahead of these men trapped in a highway to Hell. Much like the oil entrepreneur black comedy
'There Will Be Blood', 'Sorcerer' captures in a bottle the sheer awesome horror
of an oil well explosion in all it's awful glory.
Sadly, this
1977 super production co-funded by both Paramount Pictures and Universal
Studios spiraled far over budget and was eclipsed by the groundbreaking success
of George Lucas' 'Star Wars'. An early
chapter in the death knell of director driven pictures, which would ultimately
be closed with Michael Cimino's financial disaster 'Heaven's Gate', 'Sorcerer'
would find itself in limbo for many years and was nearly lost forever to a
rights gridlock left unsorted by it's two financiers. The box office failure of 'Sorcerer' was tied
to many factors, starting with it's misleading title, with some viewers
expecting another 'Exorcist'. The
casting of Roy Scheider in the lead role didn't have the box office draw needed
to recoup the film's extravagant costliness.
Expensive set pieces were either re-shot due to lighting problems or the
look of the sets themselves, and the cast and crew suffered hardships such as
Malaria to Gangrene as a result of the jungle shoot.
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| "Must....drive....faster." |
For years,
'Sorcerer' was nearly forgotten and dumped on video sourced from poor and
damaged masters only available in fullscreen.
With the same desperate fervor as his four protagonists hung out to dry,
Friedkin fought to save his masterpiece from sinking completely from sight in
court with a lawsuit against both studios.
An uphill battle with the studios claiming neither knew who owned the
rights to 'Sorcerer' eventually did prove victorious when Warner Brothers swooped
in and saved the day, securing the rights and financing the full digital
restoration of the picture. This week,
one of the most requested and personal titles of Friedkin's catalog finally had
it's day in a remastered Warner Book Blu-ray edition, supervised and approved
by Friedkin himself. While the remake
trend as of late has grown beyond passe, 'Sorcerer' is that rare
reinterpretation that at once acknowledges it's influences while managing to
carry it's own hefty weight with a punch that genuinely stings and burns long
after you've endured it. In short, this
is one of the most intense, virtually unseen action thrillers of all time.
