Sorcerer 4K

Sorcerer
1977 – 1.85:1 – 121 Min.
Criterion – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Amidou, Francisco Rabal
Written by Walon Green
Directed by William Friedkin

The son of a French politician, Henri Girard was 28 years old when he was imprisoned for the murder of his father—19 months later he was found innocent and freed, in body if not in spirit. In 1947 the embittered Girard disappeared to Venezuela where he worked as a prospector, cafe manager and truck driver. Later in life he became a resistance fighter in the Algerian war and turned to investigative journalism. In 1950, under the pen-name “Georges Arnaud,” he wrote The Wages of Fear. The story of four truckers hauling nitro through the twisting terrain of South America was a fine-tuned exercise in suspense with more than one cosmic joke along the journey—and Arnaud didn’t stop there; the novel is a merciless commentary on what is usually described in Philosophy 101 as “the human condition.”

Upon its publication the book sold near two million copies worldwide. Henri-Georges Clouzot prevailed in the bidding war (dispatching Hitchcock among others), and in 1953 Clouzot’s adaptation won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was beside himself; “You sit there waiting for the theater to explode.” American audiences would continue to wait: when the film was finally released in the States in 1955 it was cut by 50 minutes—not for “lurid” content but its negative portrayal of Americans and their oil companies.

The film’s script, written by Clouzot and Jérome Geronimi, is an existential errand that never trips over its own pretensions or forgets that it is first and foremost a thriller—a two hour and 33 minute ordeal that convinced audiences they were sitting on their own personal powder keg (for once Crowther was right). It is one of the few undeniably great movies.

Though Arnaud’s characters are con men and murderers, they’re a mirror for the audience: hired by an omnipotent oil concern to help extinguish a raging oil fire, these desperate men are fundamentally working stiffs just like you and me, wage slaves in excelsis. Considering the film’s startling, unflinching brutality and stubbornly unsentimental atmosphere, it’s a small miracle how popular it was, and is. It has spawned a few imitators; Howard Koch’s 1958 Violent Road was a modest programmer starring Brian Keith, and director Julien Leclercq engineered a computerized debacle for Netflix in 2024—Koch’s film was ignored while Leclercq’s was met with contempt. Stationed midway between those two films in 1977 was William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.

Friedkin’s desire to make the movie bordered on obsession (Paramount was stubborn but so was Friedkin) and the production proved as daunting as one of Werner Herzog’s apocalyptic undertakings. Friedkin humble-bragged; “(Sorcerer) seemed an impossible film to make, which is why I wanted to make it.” The director had promised a new spin on the tale but used both the book and Clouzot’s film like a Fodor’s Guide—it’s impossible to talk about Sorcerer without comparing it to its European inspirations—it would be like discussing Gus Van Sant’s Psycho without acknowledging the existence of the Hitchcock classic.

Walon Green, the screenwriter for The Wild Bunch, was hired to update Arnaud and Clouzot’s storyline for the Me Decade; he clearly studied Friedkin’s The French Connection carefully. Sorcerer’s frantic prologue rockets between Jerusalem, Paris, and New Jersey (a kinetic and shakily effective sequence filmed in the style of The French Connection, The Battle of Algiers, and Z). The film’s four protagonists are introduced with blood already on their hands; Roy Scheider plays Jackie Scanlon who drives the getaway car after a violent church robbery in Jersey, Bruno Cremer is Victor Manzon, a French financier on the lam for fraud, the Moroccan actor Amidou is Kassem, a Palestinian freedom fighter at the center of a bloody coup, and Francisco Rabal is Nilo, a slippery triggerman with a hidden agenda. Theirs are very public crimes and there’s no place left to hide in Paris, Jerusalem or Jersey—the four men have no option but to vanish. And vanish they do, into Porvenir, a South American sinkhole dominated by tin pot dictators and Big Oil.

Dick Bush’s cinematography is as grainy as a documentary but his colors, particularly the bright red of clothes drying in the hot sun or the splash of fresh blood on a wall, are remarkably vivid, hallucinatory—the effect is both lush and degraded (and very at odds with the sinewy electronic melodies of Tangerine Dream). Once in Porvenir it’s easy to believe you’ve signed up for a Club Med in purgatory; the iridescent flora, fairy tale scenery out of The Jungle Book, is surrounded by mud, lice, and starvation. Friedkin and crew really paid the price for this movie; crew members  suffered gangrene and other serious illnesses and the director himself contracted malaria. But with all his troubles, once the criminals become survivalists, Friedkin’s direction takes all the chances of a wealthy tourist on a posh safari; he keeps a safe distance from the real challenge, discovering what is in the hearts of these men. We observe Scheider and his cohorts as they suffer unimaginable trauma but their suffering is skin-deep, it doesn’t resonate like the fates suffered by Clouzot’s doomed truck drivers.

The New York Times described John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as “the collision of civilization’s vicious greeds with the instinct for self-preservation in an environment where all the barriers are down.” Sierra Madre was a profound influence on Friedkin but he didn’t have the instincts of battle-scarred artists like John Huston or Georges Arnaud whose own renegade natures helped us to identify with men like Fred C. Dobbs and the anti-heroes of The Wages of Fear. Contemporary audiences responded with indifference and the 22 million dollar film was considered a failure. The passage of time has polished Sorcerer’s reputation (to quote Huston’s Noah Cross, “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough”) and Criterion has gone the distance with their new home video release—it’s a shrine to Friedkin’s ambition and perseverance.

Criterion presents Sorcerer in a three disc set containing a 4K Blu ray, a standard Blu ray with supplements, and a third disc containing even more extras. But the true revelation is the immaculate picture quality. Bush’s cinematography shines in the international locations — the chateau restaurant in France, the streets of Boston, the Latin American shanty town, and the stylized jungle settings. There is an pronounced edge to the image that adds subtle details, particularly in the harrowing bridge-crossing scene set in a monsoon. Say what you will about the dramaturgy, the look of Sorcerer is singularly beautiful.

Just a few of the extras are…

Francesco Zippe’s Friedkin Uncut from 2018 featuring interviews with Friedkin, Walon Green, Wes Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola, among others.

A new conversation between filmmaker James Gray and film critic Sean Fennessey.

A chat with Friedkin and filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn from 2015.

Archival audio interviews with Green and editor Bud Smith from the collection of Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, author of William Friedkin.

Inside the keep case is an essay by The New Yorker’s film critic Justin Chang.

Here’s Bernard Rose on Sorcerer: