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[Hide] (503.7KB, 1920x1080) I just watched Sorcerer (1977) today and I wanted to post something while it was fresh in my memory. The film is the second adaptation of the French novel Le Salaire de la Peur, or The Wages of Fear as it's more commonly known in English. I described that film in >>354, but the premise is that four men have to transport unstable nitroglycerine across several hundred miles in unstable trucks.
Sorcerer follow the same general story, but the cargo is cases of dynamite that have been stored improperly in the South American jungle, which has caused the nitro to leak out of them and pool in the bottom of their crates. The four main characters are an assassin, a man fleeing the Irish mob, a Palestinian militant who set a bomb in Israel, and a French banker who was accused of fraud and couldn't pay his collateral.
The movie had a bit of a troubled production due to being shot on location and is more "lopsided" than the French film. The editor fucking loves jump cuts, and there is no spoken English for the first 16 minutes - in fact, the subtitled version I found didn't include subtitles for all lines of dialogue, which made me think I was missing something. However, once the dynamite and driving were introduced around the halfway mark, the film quickly accelerated into some of the best tension I have ever seen. If you like tension or suspense at all, you owe it to yourself to watch this one.
Sorcerer is much grittier than The Wages of Fear, and it presents each obstacle and piece of action in a much shorter fashion: instead of coming across something in the road and having the characters observe and discuss it, the film will simply cut to an obstacle and let the image speak for itself. The characters don't speak much except to get on each others' nerves or to express some deep emotion when their backs are up against the wall, which I found to be extremely refreshing because I hate films that rely on dialogue too much. The film being in colour adds a lot to it being generally visually stimulating, and there are smaller details that underscore how shitty the infrastructure in South America is - the characters have to cannibalize several old, shitty trucks in order to make one that's even halfway functional, and the montage of them going through all these metal husks to find parts and assemble them is really engaging without veering into outright comedy.
I was also unsure how this film would handle the potential for character deaths, since the point of the French film was to be an existentialist exercise in misery and suffering, but obviously that doesn't play well to a Hollywood audience. I will just say that I was genuinely surprised in several places, and not in the hamfisted way you'd expect:
>character says "oh, how I wish I could see my family again"
>character constantly mentions "oh man, if only my family could see me now"
>character ACTUALLY LIVES, ZOMG!!!!!
And so on. There's none of that in Sorcerer.
I want to mention the editing more, because the film is incredibly stark: there is very little camera movement except for the occasional pan/tracking shot, or a POV shakycam shot from inside the truck seat or under its wheels. It almost feels like the film doesn't care about the viewer, but it's not actively hard to watch. I think the best way I can describe it is that every shot is meant to have the emotion of standing on a road in the middle of a humid jungle: it's not there to be your friend, but it doesn't care enough about you to hate you, either. It's just what it is, and what it is is probably going to kill you. There were several scenes in this movie that genuinely had me glued to my seat with my heart in my throat, which is very rare for me.
Although the film has its rough spots, I strongly recommend it for anyone who likes good suspense cinema. It's especially interesting as a companion film to The Wages of Fear, but it's not a direct remake because the characters and overall style are completely different. I only heard about this film because it was a footnote in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I'm trying to get the word out and make as many people aware of it as possible.