“Tedious”, “Dire” – Which Film Is This?

“Advances at far too slow a pace”, “condescendingly over-emphatic direction”, “tedious”, “dire”.

The film being described is William Friedkin’s “Sorcerer”. And the quotes come from two well-known film guides, the Time Out guide and Halliwell’s. Two of my go-to film reference works. The latter gives the film a zero star rating, thus placing it on the same level as Carry On Emmanuelle and Plan 9 From Outer Space.

So it must be terrible, right? Wrong.

I’d heard rumours about the film for the first time last year. Before then I had consigned it to the bin of the many films I had no intention of ever seeing. I mean, critics couldn’t be that wrong, could they? Wrong again.

So last week I saw the re-released Sorcerer on the big screen (HOME in Manchester) and……….wow. Really, it was quite possibly a masterpiece and Friedkin’s best film. (This after making The French Connection and The Exorcist).

It was gripping, tense, it had a real physicality to it. It was almost tactile in its conveyance of time and place. It makes no concessions to fashion or to the economics of cinema. It contains probably Roy Scheider’s best performance. The soundtrack by Tangerine Dream really added an extra something. It had an immersive realism which few films achieve.

So, what happened? Why such extremes of critical reaction? I can’t think of another film which has been so castigated on its release and then praised so highly many years later, the only exception being Heaven’s Gate.

I offer these reasons.

The title of the film does not give any indication of what the film is about. It could be about a magician. It turns out that Friedkin was originally going to call it “Ballbreaker” which I quite like too. But why “Sorcerer”? Well one of the trucks is called by that name. But Friedkin also says it was to convey the sense of men’s lives hanging in the balance like play-things in the hands of fate.  And also it was a sly nod to the title of his previous film The Exorcist”. So certainly the film’s title doesn’t help.

But there’s more to it than that – the film was released at the worst possible time, at the height of Star Wars mania in 1977. And it therefore sank without trace. Rather than capturing the public mood, the film spat it out and threw the public mood back in the public’s face. Star Wars was about light versus dark, Sorcerer was about light AND dark intertwined. But I’ve still not finished, I think there’s even more to it….

The original Wages of Fear is probably a masterpiece. I think Friedkin was asking for trouble in re-making it. I mean, how dare he?? I think many critics at the time probably felt it was disrespectful of the original to even try to re-make it, something akin to re-making Citizen Kane. I’m not saying that critics were even consciously aware of this attitude but it could have played a part. And they therefore over-reacted in their response. In fact it’s the only example that springs to my mind of a re-make being the equal of the original.  There are many quality re-makes of mediocre films, yes, but not re-makes of quality films that are of equal quality. There must be others, but I can’t think of any, so if you have any suggestions send me a comment below.

And let’s not forget that Friedkin had already made two very good films prior to this. No way could he be seen to have made three quality films in succession. Not even Orson Welles did that. It was time for him to fall.

If Sorcerer was released today I think it would be hailed as a great film. In some respects it reminded me of Mad Max: Fury Road, in its adherence to verisimilitude and the mechanics of action film-making. Like Mad Max: Fury Road, there’s no CGI. These lorries really are driving over a flimsy rope-bridge. You can almost smell the oil and petrol.

The Time Out film guide says that it has a “relentlessly grimy realism in the opening half-hour”. What on earth are they talking about? The “relentless grimy realism” is all the way through the film!! And that’s precisely what’s so good about it! Yet they make out that it’s a bad thing. I wish that more films had its level of “grimy realism”.

Sorcerer is the most important re-release of the year. Enough said.