'The most beautiful location in the world doesn't mean shit next to Steve McQueen's face.' ~ William Friedkin

William Friedkin had an artistic blank cheque to produce anything his heart desired after the massive successes of his two prior films The French Connection and The Exorcist, and he desired to remake a French classic from the 1950s, The Wages of Fear. Friedkin had to buy the rights from Georges Arnaud (the original author), instead of the French film production company but ran it by director Henri George Clouzot to get his approval anyway. Friedkin had massive casting issues before he settled on Roy Scheider, a big enough box office name to satisfy the accountants at Universal and Paramount and employed The Wild Bunch writer Walon Green to write the new screenplay that only owed a small amount of key elements to the original film, the most important of which was a fine pitch of existential dread.

A group of disparate expats with shady pasts are laying low in a remote twin in a South American country when the American Oil Company they work for asks for volunteers to help extinguish an oil fire on the other side of the country. Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider) is an American on the run from the Mafia and he leads a Frenchman (Bruno Cremer), a Palestinian (Amidou) and a Mexican (Francisco Rabal) in repairing the trucks needed to take unstable high explosives across dangerous terrain to deal with the oil fire. The four set off in two trucks named Sorcerer and Lazaro to undertake the hazardous journey with the threat of annihilation ever present.

In hindsight it seems bizarre that any Hollywood company would spend $22 million (in 1970s money) to produce a major film about four unlikeable characters (with only one lead role a recognisable marquee name) with a synthesiser score by a German rock band, that begins with 20 minutes of subtitles set in foreign cities before English is spoken – American audience members walked out apparently thinking it was all subtitled! The major studios had seen New Hollywood dominant and had struggled to understand the new paradigm post Easy Rider, but prestige hits like The Godfather and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and blockbusters like Jaws and The Exorcist had changed the game and money flowed into unlikely projects or proven directors, of which Friedkin was one. He tried to offset the risk by bringing in big names like Steve McQueen and international stars like Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura. McQueen initially was enthusiastic but then wouldn’t do it unless his girlfriend Ali McGraw was cast and Friedkin tried to get Robert Mitchum, Clint Eastwood and jack Nicholson before he settled for Scheider.

Thematically Friedkin was attracted by the idea that characters can be both good and bad and that the internal struggle is worth investigating, making for a film with no clear cut heroes. Roy Scheider anchored the difficult shoot and provided a solid centre for the fractured piece, set in 4 different parts of the world for the prologue (Paris, Jerusalem, Vera Cruz and New Jersey) before it settled in the indeterminate South American setting (in actuality the Dominican Republic). The film also plays out with limited dialogue and the lack of internal exposition and character arc made it a tougher watch for mainstream eyes – silent film and existential angst is not for everyone and the story of male stoicism is not relieved by any female energy to mitigate the main characters. It’s a French Foreign Legion film without the uniforms and the sand. The problematic Dominican Republic shoot led to the replacement of cinematographer Richard Bush with John M. Stephens, who had less experience but lit the jungle scenes the way Friedkin wanted. 

But what of the film itself? It’s simply a stunning and unforgettable experience – an example of bravura filmmaking, part existential terror, part fever dream that makes no concessions to anyone or anything. The scenes of the trucks crossing the rope bridge in a driving storm are mesmerising and scarcely believable that they could be filmed pre CGI at all. The performances are all in service of the film and Scheider is note perfect as the ‘everyman’ caught in a tough spot, not a huge movie star but a fine character actor, although Friedkin always regretted he didn’t land Steve McQueen, so who knows how that would have changed the game. Every detail of the film screams of an attentive and detailed production intent on leaving every dollar on the screen and of creating a world that is undeniable and compelling. The mood is thick, charged and unrelenting – this is not a Hollywood film where the main character is redeemed or learns a life lesson as he rides off into the sunset – the ending is as cynical and as bleak as the buildup. The heat of the jungle is palpable as is the tension between the unlikely band of misfits, thrown together by a dark fate and trusting of no one except the power of the unstable dynamite they sit on. The film is a suitably bleak, modernist update of Clouzot’s masterpiece and a worthy addition to the legacy of the original. Friedkin reported that during his meeting with the author to obtain the rights, Arnaud stated, ‘He didn’t like the Clouzot film, if you can believe that.’

One carry over effect of auteur theory in the 1970s was the propensity for studios to put all their faith in ‘name’ directors. If William Goldman famously wrote of Hollywood post the Golden Era, ‘Nobody knows anything’ – then at least the studios could fall back on what or who had been successful. Remember this was the era before multiple sequels, Rocky 16 or Porky’s 22… but it would be the ‘great man’ theory that led to multiple disasters, culminating in Cimino’s $44 million Heaven’s Gate, which sent United Artists into oblivion. Friedkin got there 3 years earlier in some sense, with the same effective blank cheque/fingers crossed philosophy that led him to the same excesses as Cimino (and contemporaneously Francis Ford Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now in The Philippines) – although Coppola put up the $33 million via Zoetrope and it got back with $150 million at the box office. Soon Hollywood was preoccupied in finding another Star Wars type hit, ironically released the same month Sorcerer was, and serious films like the aforementioned three epics became as extinct as the Dodo.

Friedkin never recovered commercially from the box office failure of Sorcerer and became persona non grata in big budget Hollywood after his next film, the comedy The Brinks Job, failed to make Star Wars type money – it cost $16 million and returned $14 million. He went on to make many smaller and fascinating films but Sorcerer is one that looms large in his legend. The irony is when all the Hollywood accountants are dead no one will remember them or the film projects they wouldn’t invest in – but Friedkin will be a cinema immortal.