Sorcerer
It really starts with the score this time out, doesn’t it? For his 1977 thriller, director William Friedkin decided to go against convention and turn to the electronic band Tangerine Dream. It’s hard to imagine an orchestral score working better for this film. I’ve heard some of their film music before, but I think this was the first score of theirs that I have heard in its entirety. It is haunting and riveting, and ideal for Friedkin’s obsessive, insane drama. This is what the combination of music and filmed image should be at its best.
I think the first time I really became familiar with “Sorcerer” as a title was…from a “Simpsons” reference, because of course I did. Seeing the parody is one thing; seeing the film as a whole is another thing entirely. I have never seen the 1950s film “The Wages of Fear” that is adapted from the same novel Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green are adapting here, but it’s hard to imagine any film bringing the same suspense and balls-out intensity to this story Friedkin does. I’ll get to it, at some point; for now, I need to take time to stew over “Sorcerer” as its own thing.
Only a couple of times are the pasts of the four drivers ever brought up on their perilous journey across 218 miles of Latin American jungle, with aging dynamite leaking nitroglycerin as their fragile cargo. Friedkin shows us their reasons they ended up in the remote town in Latin America, and doesn’t bring it up again except at times when the fates of the characters require it being brought up for narrative purposes. Who they were before they found their way to Porvenir is inconsequential; who they are once there is all that matters. Why are they doing this job for an American oil company that couldn’t give less of a shit about their lives? In hopes of getting out of this life. Forget for a second that their actions in the opening scenes are why they’re living there in the first place- in their minds, they’re ready for a second chance at life, and the promise of money from Big Oil as a means of accomplishing that is enough.
This feels like a scenario that could only exist in fiction, because it’s too batshit crazy for reality. And yet, Friedkin’s desire for authenticity in his work is vital to making the unbelievable believable, as he did in “The Exorcist.” No, they didn’t actually carry loose nitroglycerin, but Friedkin and his actors make us believe during every second of the journey that they are. From the second we see those boxes with the old, degrading dynamite, and hear the pops coming from the character who discovers the nitroglycerin in those containers, the stakes are immediately set. I’m still not entirely sure I believe how delivering these boxes by truck over hills and rocky terrain is safer than helicopter, but I guess I understand the logic. That’s why choosing the right drivers is so necessary.
What makes the four men who will make the journey- Scanlon (Roy Scheider), Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer), Kassem (Amidou) and Nilo (Francisco Rabal)- the best four? (Granted, Nilo- a cold-blooded killer- was not one of the four chosen. He killed the fourth to get on the crew.) Up until the driving tests the company makes, we’ve only seen Scanlon drive, and up until the crash when he and his crew are getting away from robbing a church back in New Jersey in the prologue, we see why he would be a good choice. As the scenario plays out, however, all four prove their worth; Manzon- a banker- is an adept negotiator and leader; Kassem- a former Palestinian terrorist- is crucial for helping get rid of a tree blocking their path; and Nilo’s killer instincts are important when he and Scanlon are put upon by bandits. Comparisons to “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” make sense in terms of the character dynamics, but it’s hard to see any of these characters as admirable anti-heroes. After what they’ve been through, though, that doesn’t mean they deserve their eventual fates.
The set pieces in this film are unreal. Once you buy into the film as a work of hard pulp filmmaking, you can follow any implausibility it puts in front of you. The journey with the two trucks, each carrying three boxes of the nitro-leaking dynamite, is beyond lunacy. Friedkin and cinematographers John M. Stephens and Dick Bush create suspense with their camera angles and lighting that feel like Michael Bay studied them at length without studying why they were so effective in the way Friedkin uses them. The editing by Bud Smith and Robert K. Lambert is the other piece of the equation. Take the famous scenes across a ridiculously-unstable bridge. Each cut in these scenes- whether it’s to the guide on the bridge or a close-up of a face or the wheels going over the fragile wood- has an impact in terms of how they ratchet up the tension. That these sequences are the work of practical effects and not digital wizardry is what makes them so effective. What makes how Friedkin shows both trucks going over equally suspenseful rather than redundant is how we see Scanlon and Nilo get over first, then driving safely, before returning for Manzon and Kassem’s trip across. It leads to some “continuity errors” that aren’t really errors in the back and forth, since Scanlon and Nilo are seen- post-bridge- in sunlight before the rain-drenched return to the bridge, and Manzon and Kassem, but it’s an important choice in how tension is built, and released, in this film.
If everything separate from the journey feels less than impactful, I understand that feeling, but would also say that I don’t think Friedkin’s film works without all of it. He’s not out to make a conventional thriller, but simply explore how four strangers, whose choices led to them ending up in the same place, converge on a dangerous job, and how that job threatens to break them. “Sorcerer” is, truly, some dark magic from a filmmaker possessed by a vision to create something unique and intense, in a way we hadn’t seen before.
