4. Sorcerer
The box office failure of William Friedkin's Sorcerer was in many ways the beginning of the end of American cinema's second golden age, the 1970s. During that decade, masterpieces like The Godfather, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Nashville and Bonnie and Clyde reinvented American cinema, through the influx of a new generation of young, upstart film school grads deeply influenced by the European cinema of the 1960s. Then in 1975 and 1977 respectively, Jaws and Star Wars set new box office records, and the era of the "American art film" with a decent budget was over. Studios didn't care that Star Wars and Jaws were damn good movies; all they cared about was that those movies made
huge amounts of money. "High concept" movies were pursued with a vengeance, and artists had to go scurrying out to the margins of the American film industry. Sorcerer was released the week after Star Wars, and George Lucas' film more or less blew Friedkin's off the screen; after a week of playing to empty houses, Friedkin's picture was unceremoniously dumped, a crushing blow for a film so expensive that
two studios (Universal and Paramount) had been backing it. Reviewers generally scratched their heads, wondering why Friedkin would've wasted so much time and money on an inferior remake of Henri George-Clouzot's Wages of Fear. Friedkin has done some interesting work (and some not so interesting work) in the years since, but he's never retained the status as a golden boy that he acquired from the one two punch of 1971's The French Connection and 1973's The Exorcist; Sorcerer proved the beginning of the end for Friedkin as a major Hollywood director, and the film itself has slid into semi-obscurity -- the only way you can see it on video now is on a scratchy, panned and scanned, out of print DVD.
And that's a crime, because Sorcerer, it turns out, is actually a damn good movie. The film keeps the basic plot structure of Clouzot's classic: four desperate men exiled to a South American hellhole take on a suicidal mission -- they will drive across one thousand miles of jungle terrain, carrying nitroglycerin so unstable that the slightest bump will set it off. The movie starts a bit slowly for modern audiences -- the first twenty minutes or so depicting lengthy backstories for each of its protagonists -- but that slow start pays off once the actual journey starts. Instead of a fast paced car chase, Sorcerer gets
infinitely more mileage (pun intended) out of the slow, dragging, plodding pace of these trucks as they try to cross the jungle. There are setpieces, like a scene where not one but
two trucks have to cross a rickety rope bridge, that look like they must have been impossible to shoot, and that fully embody that old cliche of "white knuckle suspense". We feel like these powder kegs could explode any minute. And we begin to get a sinking feeling these men won't get out of this journey alive. Friedkin himself has said Sorcerer might be his favorite of his films; whatever its flaws, it's a powerful, ambitious work by an important director. C'mon Paramount and Universal, can't you guys work out your legal issues and get a decent quality version of this released?