"No one is just anything." Like the film's desperate protagonists, William Friedkin's Sorcerer has spent a long time in exile from polite civilization. It's been hard to find, subject to a ton of abuse and been misunderstood. The wait is finally over. I've written previously about Sorcerer's long road to respectability. Friedkin fought like the devil to get this film made and then decades later fought a series of legal battles in order to properly put the film back together again.
The result is a masterpiece - one of the most astonishing depictions of dire straits I've ever seen. Imagine an existential fusion of Bogart's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Apocalypse Now - that's how I felt when the final image of Sorcerer faded to black.
The film begins with four substantial character introductions, potent shorts in their own right. Four men in locales ranging from New Jersey to Paris are all going to have to run for their lives. Where they end up is a spot in the Nicaraguan jungle that's nothing short of the end of the line. Friedkin captures the rancid squalor of the place with incredible detail. The cinematography by Dick Bush and John M. Stephens feels like it must have been shot by Ernest Hemingway. Sorcerer was written by Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) and creates an incredibly atmosphere of escalating tension that feels utterly believable yet wildly surreal at the same time. When these guys went on location they went on location - the environments in Sorcerer feel so remote, it's easy to imagine Friedkin and company feeling complete freedom to just go for it - it's hard to picture much studio interference this far off the map.
The center role is played by Roy Scheider, right after his success of Jaws. He's phenomenal here. Low key, haunted, his last bits of dignity slipping away like a handful of sand. I saw Sorcerer when it first came out, but I was way too young to get it. Plus, like the rest of the universe, I'd just seen Star Wars, which utterly eclipsed Sorcerer. It'd be like releasing Taxi Driver the week after Close Encounters - or The Things right on the heels of E.T. - oh yeah, that actually happened. Sorcerer is absolutely a creature of the seventies - it belongs right next to Serpico, All the President's Men, Deliverance and of course, The French Connection. After The Exorcist and French Connection, Friedkin still had some tricks up his sleeve he was hungry to show - and a lot left to prove - it's too bad the world was too agog over lightsabers to really notice at the time.
If you like gritty, suspenseful action pictures with a touch of existential dread - if you loved Friedkin's other classic thrillers, you owe it to yourself to find Sorcerer immediately. It's been nicely delivered in blu-ray book packaging and the transfer is pretty obviously a labor of love. There's still plenty of appropriate grain - the film looks like it should. But the colors are just insane - the restoration work here is simply amazing. It's a super print and the audio is flawless. The sounds of those trucks, the rain - that swaying bridge - plunge you right into the middle of the jungle. The electronic score by Tangerine Dream just adds to the surreal, moody other worldliness. It sounds like a John Carpenter score at times.
The one disappointment with this historic release is the complete lack of extras - no commentary, no making-of docs, not even a retrospective. This film demands some kind of "look back" retrospective on its long journey to rediscovery - we want to hear Friedkin tell us what it was like back then. But as beautiful as the packaging is, the extras are lean. Don't let that deter you. Sorcerer is a classic on a par with Touch of Evil and Apocalypse Now. We're lucky to have this action masterpiece available for new generations to discover and thrill to.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment