Sorcerer (1977)

The Wages of Fear (1953) became one of my favorite movies when I watched, tho I might think differently upon a rewatch. When I learned that William Friedkin directed a remake right after The French Connection and The Exorcist, I was caught between "That sounds excellent" and "Can it possibly satisfy me after the original?" Further reading tells me it was a sleeper hit, partly because it had the misfortune to debut at the same time as Star Wars, but early critics were also unkind to it. Which way would I go?

TWoF has a rather simple plot: Four financially desperate foreign men take a job transporting two trucks of poorly preserved nitroglycerin hundreds of miles across South American wilderness to put out an oil company's fire. The most immediately obvious change Sorcerer makes to the story is in the details of the four men, all of them now criminal but previously unacquainted, having come to Colombia to hide: Jackie (Roy Scheider), an Irish-American mobster; Victor (Bruno Cremer), a fraudulent French banker; Nilo (Rabal), a Mexican hit man; and Kassem (Amidou), a Palestinian terrorist. Guess that's one way to ensure we don't feel too sorry for them if they don't make it.

At 121 minutes, it's 32 minutes shorter than TWoF. Unfortunately, that does not necessarily translate to better pacing. The four men's individual introductions feel a bit disjointed. It's a while before they come together, and the movie's about half over before they start the journey. I would gladly have accepted another half-hour of the latter.

Part of the fun is in seeing the men's personalities bounce off each other. They all know enough English to communicate fine, but a shared crisis is about the only thing to stop them from throttling each other. Sometimes they warm up to the idea of one truck blowing up so the survivors can collect twice the pay. Nevertheless, they do learn to care a bit. Scheider and Cremer play their parts very well, tho the former found the shooting far more of an ordeal than in Jaws.

That ordeal is hardly surprising in light of what happens on screen. The mountain and jungle roads are not well maintained, especially at bridges. The weather isn't always hospitable either. And then there are the fellow criminals they meet along the way. I won't say what happens, but as I suspected, it's not quite the same as in TWoF.

If there's one advantage this time around, it's in technology. Color alone makes a pretty big difference to our immersion, and the effects look more authentic. On the minus side, it also makes the upgraded violence that much less pleasant to watch. This picture would not get a PG today.

Sorcerer may not be the better adaptation of the Georges Arnaud novel, but it is worthy of existence in its own right. See it when you want '70s intensity without assurance of an unambiguously happy ending.