Hell on Earth, Filmed on Earth: Revisiting ‘Sorcerer’

By the mid-1970s, the audacious William Friedkin had already made two signature American films of the decade - The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). The former pushed the envelope in the crime genre with its gritty urban realism, while the latter set a new standard for dread-etched occult menace.

With ‘Sorcerer’ (1977) Friedkin - a prominent knight of the ‘American New Wave’ of the 1970s (others included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Hal Ashby) - pushed even further into the void. On its surface, ‘Sorcerer’ was a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic ‘Le Salaire de la Peur’ (The Wages of Fear), itself an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel.

But Friedkin’s version was to be rawer and more visceral, and a (criminally underrated) posthumous masterpiece in its own right. The film opens with four vignettes, detailing the violent underhand activities of the movie’s four ‘protagonists’ scattered across the globe - from Mexico to France to Jerusalem to New Jersey.

All four, who are on the lam from some outfit (police, government or mafia), end up marooned in a seedy and decrepit Latin American village, doomed to eternal damnation. It’s a globetrotting preamble worthy of Graham Greene.

When a nearby oil rig explodes, the American conglomerate that owns it needs to transport crates of nitroglycerine - unstable and ready to detonate at the slightest jolt - through 200 miles of treacherous jungle and perilous mountain roads. Our four desperate protagonists agree to take up this ultimate assignment from hell in order to secure the money with which they hope to escape their South American hellhole.

Beneath ‘Sorcerer’s’ blistering tension is an unflinching critique of capitalism’s cruelty. The film is saturated with the logic of exploitation as our anti-heroes are thrown into a jungle purgatory.

Friedkin, never a director to shy away from logistical madness, made sure the hell his protagonists endured, was real. There are action sequences in Sorcerer (filmed in the Dominican Republic) that defy logic and sanity. The most infamous involves the two trucks, named ‘Sorcerer’ and ‘Lazaro, crossing a rickety rope bridge in a torrential downpour.

In this jaw-dropping scene, the rusty trucks, weighed down with dynamite, sway perilously above the chasm, tires slipping on soaked wood as the wind lashes ropes and water crashes below. It is a scene of such excruciating tension that it borders on the surreal. No CGI, no safety net, no score - just rain, torque and the groan of collapsing faith.

Flushed with the success of his last two films, Friedkin had carte blanche on casting. Friedkin had hoped for Steve McQueen in the lead, alongside Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura. When this dream cast collapsed, he finally cast Roy Scheider - the only big name in ‘Sorcerer.’

Fresh off the success of Jaws (1975), Scheider gives the most intense, haunted performance of his career in ‘Sorcerer.’ Tangerine Dream’s electronic score gives Sorcerer its otherworldly pulse, humming, throbbing, radiating dread. It lingers like a fever dream.

The most remarkable thing about ‘Sorcerer’ is how thoroughly it resists escapism. This is an adventure film where the adventure is a death march, where the destination is not salvation but obliteration. Even ‘Apocalypse Now’ (where Francis Ford Coppola nearly lost his sanity filming in the Philippines) with which Sorcerer shares a spiritual kinship, offers the catharsis of madness. Friedkin offers no such relief.

When ‘Sorcerer’ was finally released, it collided headfirst with ‘Star Wars.’ Audiences didn’t want grit. They wanted galaxies. Critics dismissed it. The title only added to the confusion. Was it a horror film? A fantasy?

The failure of Sorcerer at the box office sapped Friedkin creatively. Like Coppola, who barely survived the making of Apocalypse, Friedkin would never again scale the heights he reached in the 1970s.

But time has a way of rewarding the cursed. Today, Sorcerer is recognized as a criminally underrated masterpiece of the ‘American New Wave.’

For my money, it is Friedkin's finest work: a fevered portrait of men with no past and no future, grinding across a landscape that actively wants to kill them.

Watching it today feels like a message in a bottle from a vanished era of personal, risk-laden filmmaking. One where danger was not just part of the story - it was the story.