Videophile: Sorcerer

Roy Sheider is famous for his skittish leading role in Steven Speilberg’s Jaws, and director John Friedkin is notorious for his cult classic horror flick The Exorcist (essentially, a fatuous B-movie) and the classy French Connections, but neither of these guys did better in a movie than the lesser known Sorcerer.

This movie is a remake of the arthouse smoke 'em Wages of Fear, but I can’t stand the original, even though it’s taught in film classes and dissected from opening credits to closing credits. It’s a great movie, in its own way, but it’s a movie that still misses the best story available; Friedkin hits that, discovers that, and does it.

I think this film, while less politically conscious, is far superior; although it was never a blockbuster in the way I think Friedkin might have imagined, much like Francis Ford Coppola’s under-appreciated jazzy classic The Conversation, it’s work in which is able to showcase all his cinema and story talents without the stress of making a movie for Hollywood. He did this after his huge success, and you could tell he did whatever the hell he wanted. (Note Werner Herzog’s diluted new Hollywood movie, the title escapes me, to see what happens when great directors try to make a buck – after they’ve made their slew of independent features.)

The plot here, as always, is what drives me. Sheider plays a crook who ends up in loose ends somewhere deep in South America; he’s given an offer, along with several other low-lifes from various parts of the world, to lead a two-truck caravan down a perilous, mountainous road through a dense jungle. Both of the trucks are loaded with a fragile, highly explosive material; if the trucks bounce too much or overturn, the explosives will go off. They’ve been rigged and positioned very carefully inside the back of these giant old, behemoth trucks. If the motley ragtage collection of desperate, swarthy and unscrupulous men are able to deliver the goods successfully, they’ll be free. But it will take quite a long time, and the money's on the jungle. Over the course of the movie, one by one, each of the men foul-up, and the odds of delivering the goods becomes more and more slim. The most famous scene in the movie involves the passage of one choking truck over a rickety swinging bridge – in a driving tropical storm.

This movie is, in essence, what any half-ass action film can only dream of being; authentic, gripping, compelling, and completely without morals or any notion of good and evil. That seems to be the best environ for fiction. It speaks to me the way any classic narrative does. The only thing to do here is to survive, and in the scenario, the truth of human existence becomes clear, or not. Most importantly of all, to me, is that the film has that dirty 70’s grit; the people here and the story here don’t feel filmed so much as lived. It’s sweat, horrific, and gripping. All great movies grow out of great story, and the truly great ones do what Sorcerer does effortlessly – they tell the story plainly, with splendid human characters, essential details, and unpredictable results.