Review of: Sorcerer 1977

A startling and abrasive film that was lost due to the timing of its release.

We are entering June of 1977. Star Wars: a New Hope and Smokey and the Bandit were released the month before. In a few short months, Close Encounters would hit theaters as well. William Friedkin’s gritty and too-real-for-its-own good Sorcerer would be buried in the rubble.

Our story starts with very little to go on; we are given four short anthology-type stories of how our lead characters end up in this South American jungle hell hole. They all end up in an area of extreme poverty. They hide from the world because most of them are wanted by someone with money and power. Our character, Scanlon ( Roy Scheider), robbed a mob-run church. They start to double-cross each other immediately after the job, and a wreck ensues. All the men are killed except Scanlon, who escapes and goes on the run.

While their story plays out, a political war erupts between American oil drillers and local politicians. Freedom fighters don’t want the Americans there, but the Americans have paid for government protection. The local officials can’t afford to piss off the guerillas, so nothing is done. The operator of the drilling site decides he needs to buy some dynamite and nitroglycerine to help compensate for the drilling rig losses. The problem is the nitro is old and super volatile.

This brings together our four characters as they take the job of hauling the extremely dangerous nitro across hundreds of miles of South American jungle.  Every step of the way, they encounter more and more difficulties—Not just with the payload but with each other.

This is one of those films where the pressure of the situation constantly builds. Constant turmoil and tension build as the men fight for their lives against each other, but also not to accidentally blow themselves up while trying to buy back their freedom.

Just watching this makes you feel how miserable this must have been just filming alone. The constant downpour of rain is just brutal. The scene with the broken-down old rope bridge is unnerving as hell. Watching as Scheider’s character tries to navigate this giant dilapidated truck across while only inches above the water in the middle of a monsoon is pretty pulse-pounding. What happens next with the men in the other truck is more terrifying than any horror movie. Their struggle to survive hangs on a thread in every scene, and it never gets easier—even as the film gets closer to the end. It only gets harder.

Scheider is stellar as our lone recognizable face, but the other three men are just as believable. This is a film built around the desperation to survive. Each of these men gives a “real as it gets” kind of performance.

Tangerine Dream ( Legend, Near Dark) performed the score and had to create it without seeing any of the film whatsoever. Parts of it would be reused in The Warriors just a few years later. It’s a very brooding and atmospheric piece that features a mostly ominous tone meant to build the destitute type nature of what is happening in the film. There is no light here—only darkness.

It’s a shame this movie seems all but forgotten, but for the time I do get it. George Lucas had just dropped the first film in his long-running space opera Star Wars, Smokey and The Bandit would prove to be the sleeper hit of the year, and fellow Jaws actor Richard Dreyfus would have a film that would be remembered for years to come in Close Encounters. They are all films of a lighter tone. The Vietnam War had officially ended by 1975, and the world was tired of doom and gloom. The United States’ cultural climate was reflecting that.

There was little room for the humanistic mind acrobatics that Friedkin would drop on the world. The fact that it is also subtitled in many spots because of the origins of the men didn’t help either. Subtitles are required through large portions of the film as each of our characters speaks a different language. The world wasn’t ready for an English, Spanish, German, and French spoken film.

Friedkin recently passed away in the Summer of 2023, but his mark on the film industry will live on. Building a body of work that includes The Exorcist, The French Connection, To Live and Die in LA, Bug, Killer Joe, and Sorcerer is enough for any young filmmaker to take notice—Friedkin was a genuinely visionary director and artist.

How far will a man go for redemption? Literally to the ends of the earth. I hope more people search this film out and give it a watch. It deserves to be seen. It’s available on Blu-Ray and streaming from Amazon.