SORCERER 4K Review: Friedkin's Fury Road

When I was a wannabe film director back in the '90s, myself and all the other wannabe film directors at York University passed Peter Biskind's doorstopper, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, around like the New New Testament.

That probably doesn't reflect well upon any of us, in retrospect: Biskind's account of the wild excesses of the American "New Hollywood '70s" was little more than an exorbitant series of anecdotes about filmmakers (almost exclusively men, almost exclusively white men) behaving badly.

But hey: when you're 20 years old and nervously preparing yourself to take on the world, the sheer "I'm right, fuck everyone" chutzpah of the Coppolas, the Lucases and the Hoppers of the world felt inspiring.

No less so, of course, in the case of William "Billy" Friedkin.

Like a lot of the movie brats, Friedkin came out of television, put a few solid pictures under his belt in the late 1960s, and then hit the Hollywood stratosphere. We can quibble about whether the blockbuster was truly cemented in the public consciousness with The Godfather, Jaws, or The Exorcist; but the latter was Friedkin's, and following on The French Connection -- another bullseye -- it canonized Friedkin in the brief, glorious list of Hollywood filmmakers who could do no wrong... until they did.

What a filmmaker does with his golden ticket is always instructive. What's the one project that virtually unlimited prestige and clout buys you? Friedkin turned to Georges Arnaud's 1950 novel, The Wages of Fear, previously adapted by Henri-Georges Clouzot as the spine-tingling masterpiece Wages of Fear (also in the Criterion Collection) in 1953.

Friedkin chose to adapt the novel again. He was persnickety on that point: this was not a remake of the Clouzot film. If the Biskind book is to be believed, however, Friedkin did get Clouzot's blessing to undertake the venture, promising the director on his way out the door that "I will not do it as well as you did."

If Biskind is to be further believed, after the first test screening of Sorcerer, Friedkin answered his own assertion: "I was right!"

Sorcerer has lived under that perceived weight of failure for most of its life. The movie also had the god-level misfortune of being released a couple weeks after Star Wars in 1977.

The American public, two years out of the Vietnam War and three years after Watergate, wasn't looking for an inquiry into colonialism, capitalism, and the worthlessness of mens' souls that is as nihilistic as anything that has ever been put on film. They were looking for laser swords and special effects; I, of course, am in no position to argue with them.

Critics hated Sorcerer, too, but they came around as the decades wore on, as critics tend to do. Sorcerer is actually terrific: thorny, sticky, morally courageous and almost gleefully provocative. (The board of directors of Gulf + Western, who owned Paramount at the time and were funding the movie, legendarily adorns the wall of the rapacious oil company in the film.)

It's also a feat of physical production and "holy-shit-what??" set pieces at a challenge rating so high that it makes Mad Max: Fury Road feel like a pleasant drive in the desert. Think, instead, of Fitzcarraldo: Herzog was hauling steam ships over mountains; Friedkin and his crew drive ancient trucks across a swaying rope bridge in a hurricane, the ropes tilting at such an angle that physics itself seems to shatter.

Taking place in a nameless oil country somewhere in Central America, Friedkin and his crew took their production to the Dominican Republic, which was largely owned by Gulf + Western, and Paramount honcho Charlie Bludhorn, in a mercenary arrangement not unlike the one depicted in the film. Friedkin's gag with the board of directors isn't just a cheeky Easter egg, it's an entire statement of principle: in a manner that has only become more and more relevant in the nearly 50 years since it was made, right up to and including the week that I am writing this, Sorcerer levels a clear-eyed stare on the resource rape and human exploitation that are fundamental to the nation-states of post-colonial Earth.

It does this by pushing four men to the Global South to live among the exploited: a French embezzler; a Mexican hit-man; a Palestinian resistance fighter; and a hapless wheel man for the New Jersey mob, played by Roy Scheider. Everyone is being kept on a poverty wage by their employer in the fictional town of Porvenir, barely making enough to get by, doing menial tasks for the oil company that owns the town, owns the hills, dribbles barely enough pennies out to their workers to keep them in penury forever.

When an oil well explodes, the only way to plug it is by moving six crates of extremely unstable dynamite, by truck, across the jungle; this dynamite tends to explode when jostled, which driving a truck across the jungle tends to include.

The company therefore offers our four leads a single, glancingly tiny opportunity to claw their way out of the hole: if they drive the trucks -- and survive -- they'll finally get enough money to get out of this place.

The plot plays as a ruthless model of the American dream -- equal opportunity for each of the men to obtain a better life, if they're enterprising enough to grab it! -- and the gambit immediately begins to fold in on itself exactly as you'd expect. Scheider has no qualms about the potential deaths of the other drivers; he practically sings about it, when he thinks the other truck cannot make the passage. "Double shares! Double shares!"

Meanwhile, with each bump and jolt, they -- and we -- grip the arm-rest tighter. These trucks are gonna blow.

In spite of what remains a legendarily difficult production in an era before CGI could bail zealous directors out of their own shenanigans, Sorcerer is incredible to witness. After a lengthy (and, admittedly, fairly offputting) prologue of four vignettes introducing each of the characters fleeing their former lives, the material in the jungle country soars. Lensed by John M. Stephens (replacing Dick Bush, whom Friedkin fired), Sorcerer is a tactile masterpiece, the green-blue gloom of the jungle offset by bright gouts of tangerine-orange fire spouts and ghost-grey, almost lunar landscapes in the highlands.

Every bead of sweat and mote of grime on the characters feels earthy and real. The new 4K restoration -- created from the 35mm camera negative, along with some elements from a colour-reversal intermediate, and presented here with Dolby Vision HDR -- is stunning. The feature is plattered on both UHD and a secondary blu-ray, for those who've yet to make the leap.

The Criterion release (spine #1267) is fat on special features, as well! A feature-length documentary from 2018 covering Friedkin's entire career -- Friedkin Uncut -- leads the third disc. It's auto-hagiography of the highest order, and one loses track of how many of Friedkind's individual films he proclaims to be the one that he hopes to be remembered for. The Sorcerer sections are good when they arrive, at least; they acknowledge that every filmmaker who wants to work at a certain scale, eventually, meets his Waterloo, and then has to find a way out of it.

There's also an extensive, absorbing conversation between director James Gray (The Lost City of Z) and critic Sean Fennessey. Friedkin, who died in 2023 after completing his final film (The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial), is well-represented here by Gray, who -- in addition to trenchant insights into the making of Sorcerer and its place in Friedkin's canon as a whole -- does a hysterical Friedkin impression.

Not done yet! A sit-down conversation recorded in 2015, between Friedkin and director Nicolas Winding Refn (The Neon Demon), runs a whopping hour and seventeen minutes. Your mileage may vary on how much you can stand watching these two jabbering at each other -- I tapped out early. Much better is the newly-assembled collection of archival audio interviews (complete with actual cassettes!) with screenwriter Walon Green and editor Bud Smith.

There's also a brief portion of silent footage shot behind-the-scenes on location during the New Jersey sequence. And, as Nessim Higson's gorgeous new cover art for the release reminds me, in a three-way fight between the truck from Duel, the War Rig from Fury Road, and the eponymous transport from Sorcerer whose entire front grille is a row of teeth, I think I put my chips on the Sorcerer. It's just been to darker places.