Sometimes you go with the recommendation from a reputable source, especially when said source has turned their skeptical eye toward the recent developments in show biz the same as you (thank you, M.B.), and that recommendation turns out to be a home run. Yes, if you haven’t noticed, movies aren’t as good as they used to be. The big budget superhero flicks we knew and loved destroyed everything. I mean, who could forget the whole Infinity Stone Saga thingamajig? They printed so much money, that Hollywood thought those sort of blockbusters would last forever and for the most part only started producing huge big budget spectacles with women and men in tights fighting other men and women in tights. The formula worked…Until it didn’t. Us, the public, grew tired of it within a decade. Why? Because all of it banked, originally, on nostalgia and CGI finally coming together, then when the masses began to somewhat care about the characters and the stories and got caught up in the shitshow, the studios thought hey! Lets keep going! But not everyone is as talented and watchable as RDJ, that was one part of the problem. The actors who grew enormously rich off the movies also grew tired of the same old shit and many quit the game because of the strict, year round physical requirements, a touch of Marvin Hagler’s silk sheet syndrome, and I suspect a stew of both guilt and newfound artistic freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted.

When you have $100 million in the bank all of a sudden that little indi movie becomes very appealing. You do it for the people…

It all got watered down due to the ginormous cash grab. The success of the previous movies led to shareholders wanting more of that same success but no amount of star power could help bad writing in an endless river of who cares trash like The Eternals and Black Widow. Even the new Fantastic Four is so bad I didn’t stick around to watch the end.

The other problem is that the public isn’t as stupid as we think they are (they’re just stupid in other ways) and after a while we all realized we had been watching the same shit over and over. The world also changed and going to the movies is harder than it used to be. People want to stay inside more than ever. It’s a problem.

I say all this because after watching Sorcerer, I realized just how bad it’s all become. But to put a more positive spin on it, I would say the movie gave me hope that the industry can be good again and it will as long as the super hero stuff, along with endless unnecessary remakes and sequels (Ghostbusters and Point Break come to my immediate mind), bomb more and more.

I went into Sorcerer knowing nothing about it which is the best way to see a flick because you have no idea what is about to transpire. I can also be quite curmudgeonly about modern movie trailers basically showing everything about the movie before you see it, so then you don’t have to see it. I knew it starred Roy Scheider and I certainly knew the director.

William Friedkin directed an incredible 15 year swath of movies from 1970 to 1985 starting with the Oscar winning French Connection, then The Exorcist (1973), Sorcerer (1977), Cruising (1980) and culminating in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). You could argue this was one of the greatest stretches in cinematic history.

Funny, I had seen all the others but not Sorcerer. No idea why. The movie had a flat tire from the get go, including lots of production troubles, but the shit luck of opening a month after Star Wars, the main reason it was such an enormous box office flop, was the proverbial nail in the coffin. Grossing just $9 million against a budget of $22 million was an insane amount of capital to lose for that day and age. For comparison sake, A New Hope was made for $11 million and Jaws (1975) a paltry $3.5 million.

However, the quality of Sorcerer is apparent throughout from the sets and on site locations to the aerial shots of jungle and the general technical feel of the film which I would do no justice in calling beyond gritty to some other realm where each drop of sweat on an actor’s face feels like it is trickling on you as you watch. Seeing something like this causes an ache for film versus digital camera work. It is a palpable uncomfortability along the lines of something like The Hurt Locker where the suspense becomes so intense you are on the edge of your seat, your nerves afire but without inducing anxiety for an hour and half like Uncut Gems. Friedkin does this in a masterful number of ways with unpredictability, a potential explosion looming after the midpoint, and nail biting scenes with heavy trucks on shitty bridges. And just when you think all is good, he pulls the rug out from underneath you.

I watched this on my laptop in my office and wish I had seen it in a proper theater. Such is the nature of our unfortunate demise as a society. Even so, I was riveted to the screen.

Sorcerer, a remake of a 1953 French film entitled Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear) was adapted from a French novel of the same name by Georges Arnaud. It evokes one film in particular, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston, adapted from the 1927 novel of the same name by B. Traven. Why? Because both movies evoke the dark side of human nature present in all of us when presented with desperation which can sometimes lead to greed when morals break down. Hmm. Sounds a bit like the modern movie studios…

Why choose the term Sorcerer as a title? Friedkin named it inexplicably after the 1967 Miles Davis Quintet album of the same name. Going in, however, I think most people, including myself, would guess the movie has some sort of fantastical elements to it, which it does not. The title itself may have also led to its unpopularity from the inception.

The film builds slow. It requires patience, but not much from me because each scene is a feast for the eyes. The scenes, the close ups of faces that had to be locals pulled from the streets, the sets, all so believably palpable they seem hewn from the seventies themselves. Friedkin coaxes outstanding but subtle performances from stars Roy Scheider and Bruno Cremer, placing them in the hellish landscape of a fictional South American remote locale. It takes a moment for everything to work, an hour, to be exact. So it may require patience that a modern audience may lack. The story itself comes together differently than the average Hero’s Journey sort of template and more along the lines of the abnormal Rocky (1976) script where the protagonists are developed first and foremost, then the meat of the movie begins halfway through. But in this story, unlike Rocky, there is no hero. No one to root for. There are shady characters that made bad choices which landed them in an awful purgatory from their regular lives. We see them together, the conditions they created for themselves, but somehow end up rooting for them. Why? This is the major crux we tend to analyze when watching even diabolical characters such as Michael Corleone in The Godfather or in shows like The Sopranos. Why should we care as to watch something about truly vile people? The typical gangster film or series gives us levels of evil where the main characters still adhere to some sort of moral ground despite their being immoral themselves but most of the time, a la something like Dexter, the bad guys only kill other bad guys, we rarely see the actual victims. In Sorcerer, a shady lawyer and a common thief are dropped together into such an awful and uncomfortable place, so uncomfortable we as an audience feel it due to the cinematography, that we want to see them get out, no matter the cost. The landscape and setting, as well as the journey itself, become more important and watchable than the characters, who are secondary to the overall goal. So, although Sorcerer deals with greed and desperation on the same level as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it hits differently because we see less degradation in the characters. They are already degraded. We are more curious to see if they will actually accomplish what they set out to do rather than the particulars of their own journeys. This is because they have already doomed themselves to a wretched life. No amount of money will get them out of it, but they have to try anyway. Such is human nature. The movie taps into that aspect of knowing you’re fucked but continuing ahead because there is no other choice, a strange cousin to the survival instinct I suspect we all feel at some point with a choice we have made no matter what level on the moral meter we think we are or appear to be. In Sorcerer, that level of powerlessness is magnified and becomes a quest, not for anything except for the characters to escape one shit situation into what will be, for them, another around the corner. Within the tidy confines of a nailbiting hour, in the last half of the movie, we are treated to this. We know they are doomed, and watching this with curiosity intertwined with wonderful intense moments of suspense are what make this movie worth it.

Back to my original point about how bad movies are today. They lack unpredictability. The great films of the seventies had you guessing. Also, Roy Scheider, commonly and incorrectly referred to as the poor man’s Paul Newman, is underrated.

Sorcerer: Five Stars.

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