- I must admit, I approached William Friedkin's Sorcerer with no small amount of trepidation, and I'm not talking about the trepidation one naturally expects prior to watching a movie about transporting dynamite. No, I was afraid to watch it because the first film adaptation of Georges Arnaud's source novel, Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, was so perfect that I couldn't imagine anyone else coming within, let's say, 218 miles of it. But then I recalled that Friedkin had never yet let me down and decided to give Sorcerer a try. Honestly, I'm glad I did. The film is not as great as The Wages of Fear, but the mere fact that I was not completely offended by its existence is a testament to how good a job Friedkin really did.
- Sorcerer wisely decides to take a step back to depict exactly how a ragtag group of men ended up in the dead-end South American town of Porvenir. The man calling himself "Juan Dominguez" (Roy Scheider) tried to rob a New Jersey mafioso's church but had to flee when the getaway car crashed. That he is the hero of the piece already tells you the class of characters we're dealing with. Next is "Serrano" (Bruno Cremer), a formerly wealthy French businessman who opted to take a powder after fraud accusations drove his business partner to suicide. There's also "Martinez" (Amidou) who previously bombed Jewish temples in Jerusalem and "Nilo" (Francisco Rabal) who assassinated people for money. You may notice that everyone in Pervenir has quote marks around their names, and one gathers that a few former Nazis (Karl John, Friedrich von Ledebur) opted to retire down there, too.
- But Porvenir is not some fancy resort town for criminals trying to keep a low profile. No, Porvenir is the town you run to when you have absolutely no other options available. The residents scrape up some work with the local oil company, headed by a seeming incompetent named Corlette (Ramon Bieri), but the local police and a general lack of available pesos conspire to keep everyone poor and miserable. But then one day Corlette's oil well blows up in one of the more convincing onscreen explosions I've ever seen. Now he needs four men to drive nitroglycerin across the mountains to plug up the well before the entire venture goes bankrupt. After some amusing truck driving tryouts, he selects Dominguez, Serrano, and Martinez. Nilo isn't initially chosen, but he is coincidentally available after another driver ends up assassinated under mysterious circumstances.
- As with The Wages of Fear, the best parts of Sorcerer are those that simply allow the notion of explosives on an unstable road to prey upon the audience's mind. The most impressive scene features a rickety wood and rope bridge that, despite post-production assurances to the contrary, must have been genuinely dangerous to work with. Other terrific scenes use the strangeness of beautiful locations in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and New Mexico in much the same way as Aguirre, The Wrath of God did to suggest that humans can be completely out of place in their own world. This idea is further reinforced by Tangerine Dream's otherworldly soundtrack and the occasional burst of hallucinatory colors. My primary complaint about Sorcerer is simply that the men, once together, don't exchange much dialogue. Whereas Clouzot's film feels like a tragedy every time fate steps in to claim another life, this film never attempts to make them nearly so sympathetic. In the end, it's difficult to claim that they didn't all get what was coming to them.
- Friedkin claims that fifty people had to leave the film because of injury, gangrene, food poisoning, or malaria.
- This was Tangerine Dream's first soundtrack for an American film.
