Qt3 Movie Club movie #1: Sorcerer

Movies
1

Released in 1977, Sorceror was the last of William Friedkin’s brilliant 70s trifecta after French Connection and The Exorcist. It was a commercial failure. It went so far over budget during shooting that Paramount and Universal both distributed it to minimize the potential losses. In the end, it didn’t even make back half of what it cost. That might explain why the DVD transfer is poor, with bad sound and no option for seeing the full widescreen aspect ratio. :(

If you’d like to be a member of the Qt3 Movie Club, your directive is as follows:

  1. Get the movie. It’s in the Netflix and Blockbuster catalogs. Alternatively, you can purchase it from Amazon.com or Blockbuster for $11.

  2. Watch it.

  3. Come back here to report that you’ve seen it and post at least a short comment. If you attempt to give the movie a number rating, I will smack you on top of your head with my open palm. It will not hurt, but it will be humiliating.

Don’t read further into the thread until after you’ve watched Sorcerer. Not only will this thread contain spoilers, but it’s for people to read and post in the aftermath of having seen the movie, so don’t post if you saw it in college or you vaguely remember it from when you were a kid. If you’re unsure about the rules of Qt3 Movie Club, refer to the relevant thread. I just finished watching the movie, so I’ll get a discussion jump started soon.

-Tom
2

We have this…

…hanging in our front hall :)

Can I get a cabinet posting to the Qt3 Movie Club?

I always loved the opening of this movie. Friedkin thinks he’s making French New Wave cinema, like Truffaut and Godard. We are introduced to people with no idea how they connect to each other, in different places, all over the world. Scheider was never better. Anyone who thinks he couldn’t act only need look at his face, at the end, when the hoods show up. It’s beautifully shot by Dick Bush (the guy who was fired from Aliens). I’m always floored when they get to the lava rock formations, near then end, and it’s like they’ve arrived on another planet.

Please, oh please, Criterion release a special edition of Sorcerer. It only need be letterboxed to make it special. Tom and I will be your best friends forever.

[Edit: to add some comments.]

3

So, get this… the Toronto Public Library has Wages of Fear in the system (I’ve had it on hold for awhile) but it does not have Sorcerer. I may really have to reach out to find this one but I do really want to watch it.

4

Tom,

I had a chuckle when I added this to my Netflix queue and in the “Other Movies You Might Enjoy” window that displayed was no other than…

The Conversation.

:)

5

Heh, actually part of my inspiration was people in the Movie Club thread saying they hadn’t seen The Conversation. :) I wondered, ‘What kind of person hasn’t seen The Conversation?’ The answer, of course, is ‘The kind of person who hasn’t seen Sorcerer’.

Awesome poster, metta!

-Tom
6

I love it when a plan comes together.

edit: for some reason hit submit before I finished my thought. I happen to be someone who has seen The Conversation but not Sorcerer, so I’m anxious to hunt down a copy.

7

Wages of Fear is in the top ten for ridiculously manly and sweaty movies (The Wild Bunch being the stick by which all other manly and sweaty movies are measured).

I know I’ve seen Sorcerer and liked it (in spite of my childhood antipathy towards the movie for not actually, y’know, having Sorcerers in it, is that a spoiler?)

I will see if I can find it at the video store, so I can authoritatively tell everyone why they are wrong and suck.

8

The Sorcerer script was written by the guy who wrote The Wild Bunch. So there.

-Tom
9

They made us watch The Conversation in my first year of film school (twenty-odd years ago) because they thought it would help us learn how to use a nagra :o

I still think it’s Coppola’s second best film.

10

Never seen it. Very interested. Leaving town in two days for a 2 1/2 week vacation. D’oh!

Oh, well. I guess the thread will still be here when I return. Adding it to Netflix!

Friedkin rules. Yes, that includes The Exorcist III.

11

Tangerine Dream soundtrack!

I’m in.

12

The Sorcerer is actually the reason I went from being a regular lurker at Qt3 to finally wanting to post here. I’d never met anyone in real life who’s seen or even heard of the movie, so when the movie came up repeatedly in one of the threads here a couple of years ago, I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and sent Tom my request to join the forum. Of course, he took his time, and when he got back to me, I’d lost my train of thought about what I wanted to post about the Sorcerer.

I had only seen the movie once, late night on TNT many years ago. But last year I broke down and finally bought the DVD. I got tired of waiting for them to do a better print. Honestly, the DVD is really bare bones, with almost no extras, and it’s 4:3 ratio, not widescreen. I still don’t regret the purchase though. Now I’ve got a reason to go back and watch the movie again! :)

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[Note: This thread is for those of us who’ve just watched the movie. You’re welcome to join the discussion, but you must pay the Qt3 Movie Club tax of actually watching Sorcerer, no matter how many times you’ve seen it!]

I love movies that open without exposition. I love even more when they launch into an hour of ‘What the heck is going on?’. For me, that’s part of the joy of watching a movie: putting together the pieces as events happen. I don’t want an opening text crawl or some character explaining who hates, loves, and fights whom. Just show me stuff and let it click as the movie progresses.

There’s a quiet ominous note in each of the character’s intros before things go awry. The way the Palestinians are goofing around like harmless slackers before presumably killing a bunch of people. Serrano’s wife editing the story about the solider killing civilians. The reveal that the bride in the New Jersey wedding has a black eye. This is so 70s. Who’s going to put a bride with a black eye in a movie today without making it a movie specifically about domestic abuse?

For whatever reason, Nilo’s story is the least developed. Was that an assassination in Vera Cruz? A murder? A crime of passion committed behind dispassionate sunglasses? And if Nilo is on the way to Managua, why does he stop here and bribe his way in? Is he sick? His little cough as he leaves the hotel in Vera Cruz is no accident. What’s up with that? The narrative fake-out is that you think he’s there to kill Scanlon, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

In a world without digital effects…

One of the things I love most about Sorcerer is that it demonstrates there are some things you simply can’t do with digital effects. Friedkin dragged those trucks around the Dominican Republic and it shows. This is like a more top-heavy Fitzcarraldo. Like the spectacle of the steamboat in the jungle, it’s still breathtaking to see those trucks inch across that rope bridge. The bridge was specially built and the water is only a few feet deep (the trucks apparently slid off numerous times!), but it doesn’t matter. Those scenes are so effective on so many levels.

After Scanlon crosses the bridge, his mix of relief and elation (“We’re sitting on double shares! They’ll never make it across that bridge!”) is completely understandable: I just beat impossible odds; I deserve something special. It’s not a Treasure of the Sierra Madre style of greed. I love that there’s nothing like that in Sorcerer. Instead, it’s a sense of entitlement for being put through hell. These men are too beat down to be greedy. Note that Scanlon doesn’t leave Nilo to die after Nilo’s been shot. And Kaseem doesn’t seem to harbor any resentment against Nilo for killing Marquez. When he gets his knife back and goes to cut Nilo’s pockets off, he isn’t interested in murder or revenge. He’s interested in getting past the kaoba tree.

What’s with the title?

I remember thinking it was cool that they’d name the trucks, but not really consistent with the sense of urgency and desperation. But this time, I noticed they don’t name the trucks. They simply paint “peligro” on the side. “Danger”.

Instead, the trucks already come with names. The one that explodes has the word “Sorcerer” on the side (that was my favorite truck, with the big toothy grill and the dragon scale hood). The one that almost makes it has the name “Lazaro” on the hood. “Lazaro” is apparently a Spanish word meaning “raggedy beggar” (thanks Babel Fish), but it’s also a name taken from Lazarus, the man resurrected by Jesus. The significance is easy to see when you consider the name of the other truck, and the title of the movie.

The sorcerer is a local myth. He moves through the village at night and breathes life into the recently dead, turning them into zombies stuck in limbo, unable to go to the afterlife. The funeral parade you see in the movie, after the bodies are brought back from the oil well attack, is a ritual to keep the sorcerer away from the bodies.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to know this in the actual movie. I recall it from reading the novelization when I was a kid (yeah, I used to read novelizations of movies…).

Native mythology vs. gringos?

The opening shot (is that the eponymous sorcerer?) is a variation on the Exorcist’s opening, where Max von Sydow gazes at the demon statue. The pay-off from Sorcerer’s versions of that shot is a single second later in the movie when one of the trucks passes the demon carving. (BTW, I’m pretty sure there were there some sort of MesoAmerican ruins visible in the background behind the oil well.)

There’s a sense that each man can’t escape his past. By trying to leave the limbo of the unnamed town (it’s the only location that doesn’t get a title card!), each man ends up dying in a way that recalls what damned him in the first place. It’s obvious with Scanlon when the man who helped him escape New Jersey shows up with the mafioso’s henchman. But consider the other guys. Nilo is shot to death. Serrano dies the moment he recalls his life and wife in Paris. And Kaseem, of course, dies in a violent explosion.

Questions

I’d love to hear your theories about Nilo. And also, can anyone piece together Serrano’s situation in Paris? What’s the deal with “the Baron”, the man who committed suicide, and Serrano’s wife? Is the idea that he’s married into all this money?

Also, what did Agrippa (the woman Scanlon dances with at the end) give Serrano before the men set out in the trucks? It looks like it might be a crucifix from studying the scene, but why does Agrippa give it to Serrano?

14

£6 from Play.com. £3 for the soundtrack.

15

I love Sorcerer and own it (actually picked it up after hanging out at Tom’s place and seeing his copy and realizing how much of an omission it was from my library).

But I do find it hard to watch because the journey is so unpleasant - I think it actually has a ton in common with Apocalypse Now, both in terms of theme (protagonists compelled to go on a trip through absolute hell for sketchy reasons) and as productions. The directors of both those movies were: (a) making their first movie after releasing an uninterrupted series of movies that rank among the greatest in American cinema (Friedkin after The Exorcist and The French Connection, Coppola after Godfather 2, The Conversation and Godfather), and as a result they initially had almost unlimited creative and financial freedom in making these pictures, and (b) they managed to eek out one more compelling picture despite adversity so tremendous that it’s almost inconceivable in modern motion picture making - working in crazy, hostile environments; facing massive production overruns due to force majeures – which forced them to make incredible personal sacrifices, and finally © both directors were completely destroyed as creative talents as a result.

They would never again regain the same heights - while they made a couple of watchable, but flawed movies after that (such as the Outsiders, Live and Die in LA) they really were destroyed by their struggles making Apocalypse Now and Sorcerer and nothing they subsequently made was ever close the quality of their movies prior to that demarcation line (a devolution that only picked up momentum and ended up producing Jade, and Jack)

16

Short version: Interesting, but it’s no Wages Of Fear.

I’m curious, Tom - have you seen Wages Of Fear? Because while Friedkin’s movie was certainly worth watching (and I’m glad you picked it, as I’ve been meaning to watch it for some time), it isn’t as tense or as thematically hefty as Clouzot’s masterful original.

I literally just got finished watching Sorcerer, so my thoughts are still a bit jumbled, but there’s two big areas where I feel Friedkin dropped the ball from the original.

  1. The anti-Americanism of Wages Of Fear is toned way, way down. A lot of the early movie was cut for release in America, which was only recently restored for the Criterion version. In Clouzot’s version, it’s made much more clear that the American oil company is there to exploit the non-union workers in every way possible. (Friedkin does throw in a sly shot of Scheider leering at a 50s pin-up picture hanging over the bar, slowly panning to reveal it’s actually a Coke ad.) The characters aren’t just victims of their own specific circumstances, they are also clearly victims of the oil company. By comparison, Friedkin’s protagonists are all bad guys - terrorists, criminals, and whatever undisclosed white-collar crime the French guy committed to make him leave his hot Parisian wife. So their eventual comeuppance doesn’t have the same existential ooomph that Clouzot brought to Wages.

  2. The trucks move too fast. I realize how dumb that sounds, like I’m one of those doofuses who complain that a real-life zombie wouldn’t run as fast as they do in 28 Days Later, but seriously they do. In Wages they move at a snail’s pace, crawling and lumbering their way through the jungle. Every single step of the journey is perilous, and Clouzot ratchets up the tension throughout the entire last half of the movie. The trucks in Sorcerer seem downright zippy by comparison, and so it isn’t nearly as tense as the original. (There’s one huge exception to that, which is the outstanding sequence on the rope bridge which Tom rightfully points out as being awesome. And it is indeed awesome. But it’s also the only time that Sorcerer approaches the tension of Wages.)

I feel like I’m coming down harder on Sorcerer than I intend. I did like it quite a bit, and I would probably have liked it a hell of a lot more if I had never seen the original. But I have, and for all it’s good points, Sorcerer is definitely wanting. It’s better than it’s rather tarnished reputation had led me to believe, but I wouldn’t put it in the top tier of American movies of the 70s.

17

I saw Sorcerer in the theaters when it was released! Do I get street cred?

18

Yeah, I usually feel movies blow it when they don’t hate where I live.

19

Or perhaps the tone of the movie was fundamentally shifted by this decision for no other reason than to make it more palatable to a large & rich market.

Seriously, Desslock. You don’t have to be an ass in every thread.

20

There’s plenty of anti-Americanism in Sorcerer, but it’s implied and part of a bigger picture. Certainly the deep vein of cynicism is very much a part of the 70s, and the US is a significant target. The oil company is clearly portrayed as a mercenary entity with no regard for human life and every regard for profits. It’s obvious the town, which is already a pit of squalor, will die an ever grosser death if the oil well is shut down. That greasy rebels (terrorists!) are instrumental in this is just part of the movie’s global cynicism.

However, madkevin’s point that it’s more explicit in Wages of Fear is interesting. Insert disparaging comment here about the French, who started that whole Vietnam thing anyway. Jerks.

Also, madkevin, interesting point about the trucks. I haven’t see Wages of Fear since, gosh, high school. But there’s a certain degree of action-ey movement in Sorcerer, even when it’s slow and tense. It’s almost like Friedkin can barely contain wanting to break out into the chase scene from French Connection. It’s like watching Robin Williams play a quiet character, and I think it works wonderfully.

I also have to wonder about the rules, or the “internal fiction”, for the crates of nitro. They do get jerked around a fair bit, so it’s not obvious just how unstable they are. At first, that bugged me, but I think I ultimately liked it. We see how explosive the liquid is, but we don’t know the limits of how much it can be jiggled. Certainly the scene with Scanlon lurching drunkenly into the light of the burning well demonstrates that, hey, these thing can take a bit more abuse that we thought.

-Tom

P.S. Anax, Desslock, and Asher, get out of this thread until you’ve rewatched Sorcerer! Until then, you jerks can’t be in our S00per Sekrit Sorcerer Watching Club!