The Hip Pocket #18: SORCERER

Friedkin's orphaned masterpiece sill bruises on impact

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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Sorcerer
dir. William Friedkin
scr. Walon Green
based on Le Salaire de la peur by Georges Arnaud
Commissioned by Bryan Ward

It’s summer, 1977.

Seven-year-old Drew McWeeny walks into a theater, irritated because his birthday party has been canceled by his parents who decided instead to take him with his friends to see some movie, and has his entire central nervous system rewired by the experience of seeing Star Wars for the very first time.

Staggering out of the theater, blown away, he stops in front of a poster, and maybe it’s because his receptors are already wide open or because he’s still dazed from what he’s seen or maybe it’s because the poster is just that interesting. Whatever the case, he stands there, staring at it, until his dad comes to gather him.

He doesn’t get a chance to see that film for thirteen years, but he is haunted by the title and by the image of this truck, lashed by a savage storm, almost falling off some flimsy rope bridge, and when he finally does see it on laserdisc in his shitty Van Nuys apartment, stoned to the gills and surrounded by film nerd friends who are just as eager to finally lay eyes on it as he is, he is shocked to see that it not only lives up to that amazing poster, but it absolutely deserves to be thought of as one of the greats.

So why the hell was Sorcerer so hard to see for all those years?

And why doesn’t everyone acknowledge this as one of the greats?

Well, for one thing, timing matters.

It’s important to see the film in the context of the moment in which it was released. William Friedkin was the closest thing to a guarantee as there was with a filmmaker in the mid-‘70s. He was making big challenging grown-up movies that were also commercial juggernauts. He was everything the studios wanted from their directors, even if he was a headache to work with for people more concerned with the bottom line than with art. He was provocative, and he knew that audiences were starting to see him as a brand name, as someone who brought a certain signature to the films he made. The Exorcist. The French Connection. Boys In The Band. This was an uncompromising man, and he liked making films that felt dangerous.

He was hard at work on his follow-up to The Exorcist, which was going to be another supernatural thriller called The Devil’s Triangle. It was set to explore the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle, offering up the solution that the ships and boats that disappeared were all taken by… wait for it… spaceships! If he had made that film and managed to get it released in the summer of 1977, the same year that Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out, things might have gone very differently for Friedkin. People sometimes underestimate just how much ego drove the film culture of the ‘70s. There was a huge sense of competition between these guys, and after The Godfather came out, Francis Coppola was the old gunslinger that every new younger gunslinger had to take a shot at with their potential blockbusters. The business was growing, and records were being shattered every year, and Friedkin was hungry to be at the front of all of it.

When The Devil’s Triangle got complicated because of the various movie star egos he was trying to juggle, Friedkin decided to try something else instead, something lower-budget, something smaller scale. I always wonder if words like that haunt a filmmaker decades later when they look back at a legendarily difficult shoot like the one that Friedkin ended up actually undertaking in the Dominican Republic. When Friedkin put Walon Green to work adapting the book by Georges Arnaud, he wasn’t consciously avoiding The Wages of Fear, the 1953 French film based on the same novel, but he also didn’t want to simply stage a remake of it. Clearly, the earlier film got under Friedkin’s skin, but so did the book, and his film began from an honest desire to do something different.

If it’s the mid-‘70s and you’re looking to make a film about men being pushed to the breaking point and beyond, then Walon Green would probably be one of the first names on the list of writers you’d look at. After all, this is the rowdy sumbitch who wrote The Wild Bunch for Peckinpah. Green was, by all reports, a striking figure in person, cut from the same cloth as that other rowdy sumbitch poet John Milius, both erudite and outrageous in equal measure. Friedkin and Green worked quickly, intuitively, and you’ve got to imagine there was an element of making a dare to what they put together on the page. That’s what filmmakers were doing at that point. Herzon went to the jungle for Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. Coppola built his own Vietnam for Apocalypse Now. For Friedkin, the lure of heading into some corner of Hell to capture this crazy ramshackle horror ride must have been irresistible.

By the time the summer of ’77 rolled around, Friedkin must have been feeling good about his incredibly difficult shoot and the difficult post-production, and the studio booked premium theaters in major cities for the release a month after the opening of Star Wars. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like when that film became a phenomenon, knowing you were the next big film to be released. Audiences must have been confused by that title, especially coming from the director of The Exorcist. I certainly was. I remember wanting to see the film, not knowing what it was, but being positively riveted by that poster. The truck looked hungry to me. I couldn’t even guess what kind of film it was. It just looked scary and dangerous and fascinating, and the trailers were just as impressionistic and vague.

To be fair, selling a William Friedkin film during that era must have been tricky. He doesn’t make easily summarized movies. His work is meant to be soaked in. He is a director whose work is best when it is immersive. You are meant to feel like the characters you’re watching, and Sorcerer was a long slow burn with a beautiful but bizarre denouement, not the thing that audiences were hungry for after the sugar-rush blissful high of what George Lucas put together. Friedkin’s movie didn’t just bomb; it got annihilated, and its failure somehow got tied together with the success of the other film, one negating the other almost completely. Part of the problem was the marketing, and part of the problem was how unconventional an experience it was. The first twenty minutes of the film are almost entirely in languages other than English, and after the opening weekend, theaters started posting warnings at the box office so people knew the film would eventually be in English.

It’s understandable that Friedkin was hurt by the reception to the movie. He’d already been at war with the two studios it took to make it, and both Universal and Paramount saw the film’s failure as a chance to gracefully walk away. Once the film was dying, they let it die. They were happy to see it go and happy to see Friedkin stumble in public. By the time I moved to Los Angeles in 1990, the film had been out of circulation for a while, and that December, Universal released the film on laserdisc. It was a major event for my friends and for me because of all the stories I’d heard about the film without any way of actually seeing it. I’ll always remember packing into that shitbox Van Nuys apartment, seven or eight of us smoking bowls and freaking out at what the film actually was. I’ve seen it five or six times since then, including a recent screening as part of Toshi’s 16th birthday movie marathon, and every time, I am newly impressed by just how great a film it was, and newly depressed at the thought that we may well have lost the “real” Billy Friedkin the day this film failed at the box-office.

While I understand why many people were disappointed that the film wasn’t a supernatural horror movie akin to The Exorcist, I would argue that it absolutely qualifies as a horror film. Friedkin’s films at the time were designed to play almost like virtual reality, and this is maybe the most amazing of them in that regard. Each of the prologues drops you into a specific place without doing anything to make it easy on the viewer, and when it finally cuts to the deep jungle where the majority of the film takes place, you practically break a sweat from how much it feels like we’re in this little scar in the earth that you can’t even call a village. This is a film about being strapped into the driver’s seat of a bomb with no way out and nowhere to go, and Friedkin did a great job of making the audience feel like it was happening to them. The reason that this film and The Exorcist and The French Connection and To Live and Die In LA are all so good and the reason they resonate the way they do is that they play in hindsight more as memory than as films. You remember how they felt. You remember the almost tactile quality of their biggest scenes.

More specifically, though, this is a first-world horror film, in which the absolute worst thing that can happen to the main characters is that they are forced by circumstance to become third-world citizens, in every way. They have everything stripped from them, and when they end up in Porvenir, they are truly nobody. The entire place is funded by one company, and the only reason anyone is there is to work these thankless, shitty jobs. These are the flotsam and jetsam of the world, sent to do awful things in awful places and forgotten as soon as they go. The film sets up a great evil ticking clock in the form of Scheider’s backstory, but it’s easy to forget those prologues once the film drops us into the jungle.

It’s a fascinatingly structured movie. I can see why some audiences were puzzled by the way the film opened if they were expecting something like Friedkin’s early blockbuster thrillers. The first sequence is in Veracruz, Mexico, the second in Jerusalem’s occupied West Bank, then Paris, and then finally in Elizabeth, New Jersey. It’s not until that fourth sequence that Roy Scheider shows up. Until then, it’s Francisco Rabal, Amidou, and Bruno Cremer. That’s a long time to make your audience wait until they recognize someone, and Friedkin did try to cast more familiar faces in the other roles. Even Scheider wasn’t really who he wanted. He chased Steve McQueen for a while and then went after Jack Nicholson. I like those choices, but I would have loved it if he’d gotten Clint Eastwood, another of the stars he pursued. Those guys smelled the crazy coming off of the film, though, and they recognized just how tough that shoot in the Dominican Republic was going to be.

I’m glad he “ended up with” Roy Scheider. I think Scheider is one of the actors we don’t discuss often enough when we’re talking about the greats of that era. Maybe he made it look too easy. Maybe he seemed like a guy who simply showed up and read the lines. But he had an uncanny way of attacking a scene, and I can’t think of many actors I can compare to him. When I think of All That Jazz or Jaws or Marathon Man or 2010, I think of a guy who approached his characters with intelligence and poise, who had a real way with a line of dialogue. He vanished into his work, and one of the highest compliments I can pay him is that I don’t know much about who Roy Scheider is, but I feel like I know every character he played inside-out. He’s one of those actors who is practically translucent, emotionally speaking. Everything he does radiates loudly from within him. He’s got an intensity that isn’t born from some stereotypical tough-guy persona. Instead, there’s something steely about his strength. It’s why he’s so great in something like Blue Thunder. There’s the macho man version of that movie, and then there’s the Roy Scheider version. He could play scientists and lawyers and mobsters and make it all seem real and possible. Friedkin threw Scheider under the bus when the film went belly up, laying it off on the actor and saying he was, at best, a “second or third banana.” That’s insane to me, and one of the things that I love about the film is the way Scheider’s laconic charm gets shredded by the events of the movie. It feels like all of that built-in chill that is so vital to who he is gets demolished by the insanity of what his character is asked to do.

As the film unfolds, each new challenge the men face in the jungle feels impossible to beat. It’s traumatic, and it feels like it accelerates, like they’ve been pushed down a steep hill with no brakes. This task they’ve been given is suicidal. They have to drive nitroglycerin and dynamite over 200 miles through some of the worst terrain on Earth. These aren’t roads. They are temporary attempts to beat back the inevitability of this place. When the film finally reaches the set piece that was responsible for the image that was featured on that original poster, I remember watching it the first time and having to consciously make myself breathe. It is harrowing, awful, one of those terrible dreams in which everything gets worse with every choice and there’s no way to roll things back at all. Little by little, the men are stripped away, narrowed down, and just plain destroyed.

Once it’s just Jackie, Scheider’s character, marching along a road with a box of nitro, it feels like we’ve descended into Hell itself. It’s surreal, and a big part of the reason the film is such an overwhelming experience is because of that Tangerine Dream score. I don’t love every single syth score, and I think there are plenty of awful film scores that leaned on the prog rock sound to ill effect. Here, though, it is propulsive and dissonant and a near-constant assault, essential to making us feel just as shattered as Jackie when he finally makes it back to Porvenir. When Friedkin finally drops the punchline to the film, it’s after he finally allows Scheider one human moment, one brief taste of humanity out here amidst all this rotten beauty. He makes sure Jackie really tastes it, too, so when that hammer comes down, it becomes clear why the movie really failed and why it is too much for most audiences to take. Friedkin is a cruel and capricious god, and there is no justice for anyone here. Or, maybe, there is justice, and we’ve just spent two and a half hours with an unredeemable piece of shit.

Either way, it is a bitter taste that Sorcerer leaves, not just for us as an audience but also for the artists who called it forth. That seems perfectly appropriate, doesn’t it?

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