Film Forum

U.S., 1977
Directed by William Friedkin
Screenplay by Walon Green
Starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Amidou, Francisco Rabal
Approx. 121 min.

A professional hit in Vera Cruz; a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem; bank fraud and suicide in Paris; and a church robbery, priest wounding, and car crash in Jersey—Buñuel star Francisco Rabal, Amidou, Bruno Cremer, and FRENCH CONNECTION’s Roy Scheider find themselves down and out in a nameless South American flea pit. How to get out? Easy. In the wake of an oil well explosion, just drive two rickety trucks carrying extremely unstable nitroglycerin through 200 miles of dense jungle to put it out. Following up his two successive smashes of THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST, Friedkin’s spectacular remake of Clouzot’s classic THE WAGES OF FEAR grafts a whole lot more backstory and a whole different terrain onto the basic framework, with two hair-raising passages of heavy trucks driving in a tropical downpour on a decrepit, swaying suspension bridge over a raging river. Friedkin himself supervised this 4K restoration.

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

A PARAMOUNT PICTURES RELEASE

Reviews

“A GEM! Friedkin's tense, slow-mounting action film is one of Hollywood's most absorbing dares.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out (New York)

“Trumps today's event filmmaking with every mud puddle and pit stain. Grimly existential, one of those pessimistic stories where men work hard and gain nothing, a tough-guy fantasy as steeped in vintage men's adventure magazines as it is in the French film it adapts, Clouzot's THE WAGES OF FEAR. Friedkin's characters may not have much to show afterward, but Friedkin does: the lost gem, the rediscovered masterwork, the evidence that the guy everyone thought had lost it was right all along.”
– Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice

“A DEFIANT, MAD GESTURE OF A FILM THAT FEATURES SOME OF THE MOST EXHILARATING SEQUENCES IN MOVIE HISTORY!”
– Sam Adams, The Dissolve.com

"NERVE-SHREDDING!”
– Steve Dollar, Wall Street Journal

“Named for one of the trucks, SORCERER has even sleazier characters driving more dangerously decrepit vehicles than those found in THE WAGES OF FEAR. Almost invisible in the original, the natives here are more restive. Nature is also more malevolent; at one point, the trees and vines seem to reach out of the jungle to trap the trucks. Mr. Friedkin’s explosions are more elaborate, and his ending is more fatalistic than Clouzot’s, but if WAGES seemed to have something to do with the atomic bomb, SORCERER is very much a movie about the disaster of its own making.”
– J. Hoberman, The New York Times

“AN AUDACIOUS MASTERPIECE! Friedkin’s reinterpretation of Clouzot’s 1953 masterpiece is among his most daring works. Three sequences alone—a chaotic car crash in Boston, the unloading of charred bodies in a Central American village, and the explosives-laden trucks crossing a rickety storm-blown bridge—render SORCERER a classic and retain their power to make audiences gasp. Released the same year as STAR WARS, [it] represents the braver road abandoned by the studio system.”
– Haden Guest

“NOTHING LESS THAN A DARING, EVEN RADICAL BLOCKBUSTER; A TRULY GREAT LOST MOVIE.”
– Calum Marsh, Maxim.com

“Retains Clouzot’s perverse punchline and adds plenty of its own—the contrast between the glazed escargot inside a fancy restaurant and the brains splattered outside it, the effect a shovel has on a guerilla fighter’s jugular, the ineffable eroticizing of the village’s only woman, a toothless crone. The title is linked to a key image, the stone magus who grimaces at the fools who die for a dollar and expect happy endings.”
– Fernando Croce, Cinepassion

“THE FILM I HOPE TO BE REMEMBERED BY. I have a great fondness for SORCERER, more than any other film... Basically lost for 37 years, its restoration is like Lazarus. It looks just the way it looked to me when I looked through the lens of the camera.”
– William Friedkin