Just finished watching this – took a little convincing to get the GF to watch it (she assumed it was about guys in pointy hats), but we both ended up liking it quite a bit. Not knowing anything about the movie I didn’t get the title until they show the name of the truck, and I had a total Citizen Kane moment – “OMG, Sorcerer is the name of his sled^b^b^b^btruck!!”.
Not really much to add that hasn’t been said. I liked the slow set-up, and the fact that for an American movie, there isn’t any English in the movie for about the first ~20 minutes. Like Tom said, I like have to puzzle stuff out and put the pieces together.
Maybe stuff just got left on the editing room floor that would have helped explain things better, but the stuff everyone has mentioned bugged me too – the two roads, the killer guy who wasn’t there to kill anyone, the “huh, i guess the 2nd guys made it over the bridge anyway” moment. And maybe it was my copy from netflix, but the sound quality was all over the place. The music would swell to ear-bleeding volumes but you could barely hear the guys talking – we kept having to fiddle with the volume to compensate, which is annoying.
All in all an enjoyable flick. Looking forward to the next pick!
Having watched Wages of Fear last year, I found it impossible to watch Sorcerer without comparing the two. For me, the difference comes down to this: Wages of Fear did a much better job with its characters. Sorcerer did a much better job with its jungle and its trucks.
Sorcerer’s background introductions to the primary characters seem like they should help with characterization, but they have the opposite effect, because what matters isn’t who the characters are, it’s their relationships with one another–and those relationships are necessarily abbreviated by the time we spend in New Jersey, Jerusalem and Paris. Wages realizes that once its characters are trapped in the jungle, it doesn’t matter who they used to be. In Sorcerer, when Serrano starts talking about his wife and his watch, it’s downright jarring, because it’s the first human moment between any of the drivers since the trip started–and that makes it feel as out-of-place and cliched as a movie cop volunteering that he’s two weeks from retirement right before he gets shot. If the trucks seem to move faster in Sorcerer, I suspect it has less to do with their physical speed than it does with the diminished screen time that Sorcerer devotes to the journey.
The thing that Sorcerer shines at is the raw physicality of the environment, the trucks, and the struggle between the two. The unnamed town always felt like a sound stage in Wages. In Sorcerer, it feels like a real third-world shithole. Someone already mentioned the A-Team sequence blowing up the tree in Sorcerer, but for me the movie came alive during the similar earlier montage of the drivers assembling the trucks from scraps and salvage. That’s more effective characterization than any of the intros to the human characters. And that sets the stage for the rawness of the action set-pieces, that all leave you feeling like something went horribly wrong somewhere in production and the crew just left the cameras rolling while they struggled through it. Now that we have computer graphics, I’m afraid that a movie like this will just never be made again, and that instead of the bridge scene from Sorcerer, we’re only ever going to get the bridge scene from Pirates of the Carribean II.
Also: There was a novelization of this? That just seems really peculiar, considering that it’s based on an existing book. (In French, and apparently out of print in English.)
OK, so I just finished reading the thread after watching this.
Answers to questions:
Serrano’s crime and Nilo’s story seemed very clear to me, but I had to pay attention. Serrano’s company was guilty of fraud to the tune of 15 million francs, and he offered to pay it back. The prosecutor then handed him the note his brother-in-law had written, which rather than an offer to pay back the money was a bribe. The prosecutor was not amused, and as a result the best offer Serrano could get was 15 million francs to pay it back. The bro-in-law killed himself after realizing the father was not going to bail them out of a mess they’d created.
Nilo’s story is short because there isn’t much to it: He’s a professional assassin. He’s in town to off the Kraut.
That’s what I noticed.
Scanlon is a pathological liar through the whole thing. I can’t think of a time someone asks him a question where he answers them straight. I liked that about him.
I am now going to quote Wholly Schmidt’s post entirely because everything WS said was almost exactly how I reacted:
The only part I differ is “favorite truck” – I loved them both too much to pick a favorite.
I like this idea, but I need more support for it before I can buy it.
Nilo seems to want a place driving one of the trucks. It seems to me he kills Marquez simply so he can take Marquez’s place. Why else would he take the truck-driving test? Why else would he loiter around right before the trucks leave?
He would take the test so that he doesn’t stand out as the one able-bodied person in town not taking the test. I think the fact he tried to run away at one point proves he really didn’t want to the job; he was given a choice to face justice implemented by the other three, or replace the missing driver.
When he arrives in town, notice how all of a sudden all of these guys needed to get out of town? Before then, it was all about getting into town and keeping their heads low. There may have been the intention of getting out, someday; with Nilo’s arrival, suddenly there was an urgency. Time to sell the watch, the one remaining valuable, the last one you’d want to part with. The question in all of their minds was, “Is he here for me?”
Why was he loitering about? What I think happened was that they just happened to arrive right after he’d done the deed, surprising him – the blood was still fresh. Nilo took a loitering pose (as if he’d been there all along) to try and act natural and draw away suspicion. Of course, they weren’t fooled, because they knew why he was there all along – they knew his type.
It never even occurred to me that Nilo wanted the job, particularly given his attempt to flee.
Great movie choice! This was just the thing I was looking for when I signed up for this shindig. I’d have to add that I just love '70s cinema, it felt realer somehow. This movie, for instance, seemed like the biggest little movie I’ve ever seen. It was focused and drawn on a small group of characters rather than being epic, while having a huge territory to cover as well as some pretty elaborate special effects.
I didn’t have my head right for the jump cuts though. Like Wholly Schmidt, I was a little thrown by what happened to Sorcerer (the truck, not the movie) just as the rope bridge was giving way. It made that final lurch as the bridge was going out – the next you see of Serrano and the other guy, they’re limping up towards the other truck blocked by the fallen tree. What happened? I wasn’t sure until I saw Serrano behind the wheel again shortly after.
As a side note – I was amused to see another case of something large and unmissable somehow sneaking up on movie characters. In this case, it’s the huge drifting brush or tree that smacks into Serrano and Kassem (ok, had to look it up) just before they get the winch out to haul the tree out. I always find this jarring – you can get away with it in Jaws, I mean the shark could come upanywhere. But then you’ve got the ludicrous extreme like Final Destination, where a bus somehow sneaks up on a group of kids and creams one of them when she steps out into the street.
I also liked the fake-outs the movie gave you; naming the flick ‘Sorcerer’ after all could give you the impression that this truck is destined to succeed. But then again, this is the '70s – could be narrative disinfo. This was strengthened, in my opinion, in that Serrano almost seemed to be set up as a main protagonist. At least, possibly the most sympathetic or least unsympathetic.
I agree that the woman appeared to pass Serrano a crucifix, and I also figured it was because he had treated her with kindness. I didn’t find it a stretch at all that characters would have found this nameless hellhole with no idea how to escape – they all had reasons to get away and hide; their paths there were probably pretty headlong rushes away from their past. Getting out would take paperwork they probably hadn’t bothered accumulating.
I’ll just say in closing that is was great seeing this movie without any previous knowledge or notions going into it – I only read the synopsis on the Netflix envelope so the experience was a revelation. Keep them coming!
The dead giveaway he isn’t, however, is that Roy Scheider is the big-name draw, the guy whose face gets on the movie poster. It’s not often you get an Executive Decision moment where they pull the rug out from under you with a marquee actor getting the axe. (Which is the single most memorable thing about that movie to me.)
You’re right Rimbo, but don’t forget this was the '70s, they didn’t play by the rules. I could see them pulling a Psycho, throwing up a big name star and then killing her in dramatic fashion. By the way, the preceding sentence contained a spoiler, don’t read it.
They didn’t avoid the rules that much. And as far as rules go, that’s one that is very rarely broken for very good reasons.
It is a standard and ancient Law of Entertainment that extends beyond movies. If I go to see the ballet, and Mikhail Baryshnikov is on the ticket, I goddamned better get 3 hours worth of Mikhail Baryshnikov. I’m not going to the show to see him as part of the chorus while company players take all the lead roles. Everything else matters, too, but if I see Roy Scheider on the poster, goddammit I want this fellow, this scrawny and motley little guy from Little Rock who somehow towers over others on the silver screen, to be on it. In fact, what pissed me off about the beginning of this movie was that it took so long before we got to see Roy.
And Hitchcock knew this as well as anyone. He knew when he was putting Jimmy Stewart in high places and breaking his leg, and when he was putting Cary Grant in a field with an armed crop duster, that half the reason the audience was in their seats was to see Jimmy Fucking Stewart and Cary Fucking Grant. He knew the rule well enough to know how to break it right and make the rest of the movie work; also, he knew that Perkins could carry the movie.
And as for Executive Decision, nobody liked that guy much anyway.
Exactly, that particular rule is hardly ever broken. That’s what makes it effective, your deep and abiding love of Roy Scheider notwithstanding. Try this thought experiment: let’s say it’s 1960 and you’re fired up to catch the latest Janet Leigh flick – ooh, it’s a Hitchcock! And you watch the movie only to see her killed in the first half of the movie. Sure, Anthony Perkins did have the ability to carry the movie, but he wasn’t exactly a household name (I don’t believe, his filmography before that time looks a little light). Scheider wasn’t really Jimmy Stewart either; apparently from the IMDB notes, Friedkin considered Scheider his worst casting decision and was maybe his fifth or sixth choice. Crazy as that sounds.
It’s only effective if the director knows what he’s doing. If he doesn’t, you end up with audiences walking away saying, “What the hell was that?” You only feel happy with a bait-and-switch scheme if you end up getting a better deal than what was advertised. Like if you saw a Camaro for $5k and found out that the real deal was a Corvette for $5k.
Sure, I wouldn’t dispute any of that. And knowing that Friedkin was coming off The French Connection and the Exorcist just prior to this movie, I ranked him as knowing what he is doing, which leads back to my prior point.
Psycho’s actually a bit of a double-switch - hard as it is to believe now, Anthony Perkins had made a small name for himself in light romantic roles. The film is structured so that when Janet Leigh dies, you’re supposed to put your sympathies with that poor Norman Bates, and then Hitchcock pulls the rug out from under that as well.
It’s funny the movies (and other works) where something is definitely lost by not having been there at the time. Like the way Star Wars looked to a world that had just a couple weeks earlier given a Special Academy Award to “Logan’s Run.” The way Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” sounded to rock fans in 1978. The Crying Game. “Luke, I am your father.”
This was an…interesting…film. It was enjoyable, and well-crafted, well-acted, but I can’t help but feel it was missing something. It had so many nice touches, little details that were fantastic; the beaten wife-to-be really stood out as such a touch of realism.
Actually, realism permeated most of the film, if you leave out the whole dynamite physics. The interactions between many of the characters in their introduction scenes were very down to earth. The car crash was so nice because they went from happy robbers to double-crossing to ‘oh god, here’s reality with a traffic accident.’
What bugs me about the film is that this podunk South American town really didn’t seem like such a place to hide out. What do they say about hiding in plain sight? I’m sorry, but lily white American and Frenchman in South America screams “this is totally conspicuous!” Serrano would’ve been fine in small-town America or in a shack in Montana.
Oh, and the “Serrano loses it so we’re gonna do a psychadelic overlay!” scene? Totally made me gag. Maybe this was hip back then, but it just seems so lame now, and totally ruined the tension that’d built up to that point.
Of course, the “going crazy” scenes in π will probably seem cliche and annoying in a few more years. Heck, they were pretty bad the first time through, come to think of it.
Anyways, that’s my contribution. Interesting pick Tom, but I can’t say I’m not looking forward to a movie I don’t need a beret to enjoy fully. ;)
I won’t put it on a scale of one to ten, but I probably won’t think about the movie ever again
