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Director: William Friedkin

By Roderick Heath

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, released in 1953, is one of those classics of non-English-language cinema that can easily transcend barriers and speak to just about any audience. That’s largely because of its subject, the lives of four working men so desperate to escape their circumstances that they take on the absurdly dangerous task of trucking loads of nitroglycerine along a crude road for a petroleum company: it is as precisely appealing to the first world’s labourer as to the third world’s, a Homeric effort attempted by ordinary guys capped by a blindsiding downer of an ending that still asserts its heroes’ liveliness as an overpowering force. Clouzot’s film, adapted from a short but substantial novel by Georges Arnaud, helped define a certain brand of modernist angst in its portrait of the men at such extremes, something that would soon look like a form of pop existentialism. It also probed a peculiarly French brand of blue-collar machismo, taking care to question ideas of what constitutes courage: the gutsiness of gangster Jo (Charles Vanet), so impressive and unswerving in intimidating his fellow men, is revealed as a sham in the face of a different kind of fear, one the experienced labourers who join him on the deadly mission take in their stride.
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In the mid-1970s, William Friedkin, whose career was white-hot after the success of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), chose to remake Clouzot’s film as his next project, with a screenplay by Walon Green, who had penned Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969)—but something went badly wrong. Production in the Dominican Republic under Friedkin’s customarily gruelling and combative helming was drawn out and expensive. Critics skewered Friedkin and the film, released in the summer of 1977 with Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever, proved to be the first of several major flops that would slowly end Hollywood’s interest in promoting director-stars. After directing the divisive Cruising (1980), Friedkin began a long career tailspin. And yet like several other big failures of its moment, time has proven kind, as Sorcerer has become an object of cult acclaim.
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Both Sorcerer’s initial failure and slow rehabilitation probably stem equally from the film’s specific and spiky nature, a thrilling adventure film that is nonetheless notably defined by a downbeat attitude. The film’s political bite, a couple of years too late for the Watergate malaise, might not have helped its initial prospects. Like the original which was severely edited for U.S. release, Sorcerer reveals no love for the footprints left by first-world corporate interests in developing world zones, and explicitly defines the protagonists as pawns bribed with a larger-than-usual reward for a larger-than-usual risk that’s still the cheapest option for their paymasters. Moreover, Friedkin explicitly reordered and redesignated his main characters, who are no longer noble proletarians saddled with one gangster, but all men who have been driven to the edges of society by their criminal acts.
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The early scenes of Sorcerer do precisely what Clouzot avoided, and depict the events that drive or contribute to each fated driver’s fall from grace, plotting a graph of types of crime and worldviews that are nullified outside of context by sending them all to the same void that is life in a Latin-American shithole called Porvenir. In Vera Cruz, Mexico, assassin Nilo (Francisco Rabal) enters the apartment of a man and guns him down. In Jerusalem, Palestinian radical Kassem (Amidou) bombs an Israeli police station with a cell of comrades, only to bring swift retribution as soldiers swoop down on their hideout; only Kassem slips the net. In Paris, Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer) is forced to go on the lam after financial irregularities with the trading firm he runs bring on tragedy. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, a small gang of Irish-American hoods take a chance on robbing the profits of a church’s bingo game run by a priest whose brother is Mafia boss Carlo Ricci (Gus Allegretti). One member of the gang shoots the priest, and arguments between the thieves in the car whilst fleeing the scene cause the driver, Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider), to crash into a truck. Badly injured, Scanlon stumbles away from the scene, leaving behind his dead and mangled companions, but soon finds the mob are after him.
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Friedkin opens the film with scarcely a line of relevant dialogue spoken for nearly 10 minutes, and nothing in English for nearly 20, grasping his viewers by the scruff of the neck and submerging them in visual storytelling. He references both the early scenes of The French Connection in opening with long shots scanning a city before zeroing in to depict a brutal killing, and of The Exorcist, in noting events in one part of the world that will conclude far away, conveyed with a sense of vibrating disquiet and enigmatic purpose. Nilo’s murder is the initial shock, but unlike the shooting of the informant at the start of The French Connection, Sorcerer never explains why it occurs: the reasons are much less important than the act in this consequential, even karmic universe. Friedkin is describing courses of action already reaching their climaxes, and then sending the protagonists on to fates that in many narratives would be left as a postscript.
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The terrorist bombing is first an obscure bloom of flame in the back of a frame, and then a screen-filling deluge, churning the world into nihilistic furor. Tangerine Dream’s throbbing electronic scoring rises for the first time to accompany shots of armed vehicles stalking the streets and massive machine guns stabbing across the frame. Docudrama stylistics are in evidence. Faces in the crowd are plucked out and studied in their carefully nonchalant interest in the business of internecine warfare, and jerking, juddering, handheld shots made of soldiers launching into action, whilst the terrorists debate over what routes to take to leave the city, prefiguring a later choice of consequence in the very different drama Kassem will play a part in later. He escapes the raid, plunging into a disorienting camera whirl whilst dashing through a crowded market, and then is glimpsed as two frightened, pained eyes amidst the sea of jostling, impassioned faces, watching as his pals are loaded onto trucks and dragged away to prison.
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Manzon’s situation couldn’t be more different, and Friedkin shoots these scenes more subtly, only cranking up his signature handheld camerawork as this tragic little movement climaxes. Beforehand, he emphasises the lush civility that is Manzon’s life with his wife, Blanche (Anne-Marie Deschodt), an aristocratic book editor. Ornate Old World interiors, the product of ages of successful colonialism, surround these prim, culturally ordained winners (at one point, a woman eating dinner with Manzon and Blanche comments on the “second-rate” lobsters from Vera Cruz), though it’s revealed Manzon is actually the son of a fisherman who, like The French Connection’s Charnier, has elevated himself by both talent and a willingness to break rules. Blanche is working on the memoir of a former soldier whom she describes as something of a philosopher, reading out to her husband a passage where he describes preparing to order a cannon barrage that will inevitably kill civilians, and pondering what hand of fate might be doing the same to him. Manzon listens whilst dressing and putting on his wife’s anniversary present, a watch carved with the words, “In the tenth year of Forever.” At a meeting with a state prosecutor, who believes Manzon misrepresented his firm’s collateral, Manzon manages to talk him into holding off preferring charges if he can cover the shortfall. Manzon’s secret weapons are his father-in-law, a baron whom he hopes will forward the money to defend the family name and firm, and brother-in-law Pascal (Jean-Luc Bideau), who’s been drawn into his schemes. But the baron won’t help, and Pascal shoots himself in his car outside a ritzy restaurant (a favourite Friedkin locale for depicting class distinctions, recalling Popeye Doyle glaring through the windows of a similarly expensive dining place at his nemeses). Manzon, cut off from the momentary indulgence by the ruling class of his ambition, is left utterly alone, unable to return to his wife inside or seek recourse, left only with the choice of imprisonment and disgrace or flight.
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Scanlon’s lot is even less enviable, having been drawn into a seemingly easy robbery that turns disastrous thanks to unstable and violent partners. Broken time—the blurring of past, present, and future—is a repeating motif in the movie, and the moments of Scanlon’s crash and its aftermath, amidst jets of water from a busted hydrant, broken glass, and bright crimson blood caking his dead companions’ faces, recur in jagged, random fashion in Scanlon’s posttrauma daze and his wrestling with his very sanity and mortality in the jungle. Tellingly, apart from the mysterious motives of Nilo, the drivers all have been pursuing some ideal or dream that’s gone agonisingly sour, which allows Nilo to take the same place as Jo in The Wages of Fear, distinct from his companions. But unlike the otherwise ordinary men of Clouzot’s film, these guys are all exiled and faced with no future: it’s heavily implied they have entered a worldly limbo and that this is the tale of a “voyage of the damned.”
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Each man is eking out a living and an identity, and taken a Latino pseudonym. Scanlon is “Dominguez,” Kassem is ”Martinou,” and Manzon is “Serrano,” whilst Nilo, the latest arrival, bribes his way through customs. Kassem and Manzon work for the oil company laying pipe, whilst Scanlon handles cargo at the airport. This is a tide pool of misery: the manager of the local bar and flophouse, “Carlos” (grand old character actor Fredrick Ledebur in his last role), is a former Nazi Reichsmarschal, and Kassem’s contact “Marquez” (Karl John) is another German fugitive. Friedkin emphasises political oppression as a personal experience, as the local cops take delight in shaking down and humiliating undocumented, obviously troubled aliens, particularly Scanlon, a defenceless Yankee, to grind under their heels just as the American oil company is exploiting the local workers and landscape.
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An explosion at a well drilling in the distant mountains kills several labourers and destroys the infrastructure; the wounded and the dead are trucked back to Porvenir. Corlette (Ramon Bieri), the local site manager for the oil company, is faced with the necessity of quickly and cheaply extinguishing the fire and getting the well producing or it could mean the company’s collapse: he and his advisor Del Rios (Chico Martinez) decide to risk blowing the fire out with explosives. The only nearby supply of gelignite is dangerously degraded and sweating, and so Corlette decides to hire drivers to take the chance of transporting it to the fire site. In a late scene of The Wages of Fear, Jo and Mario (Yves Montand) chat about high old fence both remember from the old neighbourhood in Paris: the dying Jo is shocked to learn from Mario that the fence only concealed a vacant lot, and his last words, “There’s nothing there!”, point to the realisation that there is nothing waiting on the other side of death, bringing the film’s existential edge to the foreground. The note of spiritual menace and oblivion inherent in this moment briefly concerns Clouzot in the midst of a drama that is otherwise tethered entirely to a highly physical, entirely material sensibility. For Friedkin, on the other hand, this moment informed his annexation of the material and gave space to escape the shadow of Clouzot’s work with an individual artistic vision. Most remakes dally with minor, ineffectual reshufflings of plot and incident to justify themselves, but Friedkin, like John Carpenter using the shape-shifting motif of “Who Goes There?” to similarly distinguish his take on The Thing (1981), found a way to make a vibrantly different experience out of the same stuff. Friedkin turns the unfolding drama into a teeming, even grimier, more physically evocative and hallucinatory dive into the heart of darkness.
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Sorcerer becomes a spiritual sequel to both The French Connection and The Exorcist in contemplating its heroes as bodies of both good and evil, with porous identities, a notion Friedkin had pushed to even more stygian extremes with Cruising. Clouzot’s film had already been remade, uncredited, as Howard W. Koch’s Violent Road and strongly influenced Cy Endfield’s Hell Drivers (both 1958), and would later influence a generation of flashier thrillers with similar plot gimmicks, including Jan De Bont’s Speed (1994) and Martin Campbell’s Vertical Limit (2000): the latter paid homage by recreating one of Clouzot’s most famous shots—loose tobacco being blown off a cigarette paper from the shockwave sent out by an explosion well before the sound is heard. Clouzot’s own influences include the romantic fatalism of prewar French Poetic Realist cinema, mixed with tough plebeian melodramas like Raoul Walsh’s They Drive By Night (1940) and John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) (Friedkin costumed Scheider after Humphrey Bogart in Huston’s film), with dashes of Anthony Mann’s hard-boiled noirs added for flavour. The inimitable tractor sequence of Mann’s Border Incident (1949) prefigures Clouzot’s gruelling sequence in which Mario is forced to drive over the top of Jo, evoked here, too. Sorcerer’s visual textures, replete with fetid colours and underexposed graininess, recall some then-recent Hollywood films with similar ideas and settings including John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) and Franklin J. Schaffner’s Papillon (1973), a semblance Friedkin tweaks with a sensibility that recalls and anticipates some of Werner Herzog, most evident in his eerily detached helicopter shots discovering surreal blazes in the middle of the jungle.
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Sorcerer is also filled with curious anticipations of stylistic cues that would define later cinema, like a fascination with the play of light on surfaces and the effects of backlighting, and using the ground-breaking electronic score to give his work an aural texture at once intensifying and defamiliarising that looks forward to the work of Ridley Scott and Michael Mann. Mann took much from Friedkin, an influence particularly evident during the lengthy montage depicting the men reconstructing vehicles with a sense of tactile, even anthropomorphic synergy between man and machine that Mann would remix in his debut film Thief (1981). Friedkin would then ironically and problematically return the compliment with To Live and Die in LA (1986).
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Clouzot suggested alternatives for his men, particularly Mario, who had the beautiful Linda (Vera Clouzot) begging him not to risk his life. He pushed her out of his truck in part because he wanted to live up to his own masculine ideals. Friedkin strips away alternatives: his men are trapped in every conceivable way, and the only woman seen in Porvenir is the old, sagely mocking barmaid in Carlos’s tavern, who also may be the local shamanka overseeing life and death. The men are forced to move forward constantly like sharks, and prey on each other to get their chance, but are eventually forced to work together as their problems pile up. Whereas in The Wages of Fear, Jo may have been involved in the suicide of a driver chosen ahead of him or killed him to gain his spot, here Nilo does the same thing, less ambiguously: Kassem wants to kill him, but Scanlon decides they need the fourth driver more than revenge. Friedkin again recalls The Exorcist, and he notes stone-carved idols leering at them from the roadside, but whereas Friedkin conveyed religious-accented forces from beyond in his adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s tale, his horror-movie-accented take on Arnaud and Clouzot suggests more an attempt to dig into the irrational centres of the human mind and its problematic place in the face of a creation that produced it but doesn’t care for it. The greed and violence of modern society is merely a projection of the primal self found in the jungle, and each man falls from civilisation into the wild to battle more directly the forces of evil with which they’ve made compacts.
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Friedkin illustrates his ideas too stridently at points, like emphasising the church as a money-making operation fraternal to the Mob, and zeroing in on sights like one of Scanlon’s companions covered in blood and water with bank notes he robbed sticking to his clothes and the bride at a wedding sporting a big blotchy shiner. It could also be argued that the essentials of the plot were looking dated in the mid-’70s setting, where it would surely have been an easier, safer, and possibly cheaper option to use the oil company’s helicopter to fly in some fresh explosives. But the film’s quality of indictment, whilst pungent, is not oversimplified. “No one is ‘just’ anything,” Blanche admonishes her husband early on when he dismisses the author of the book she’s editing as “just a soldier” because he did not allow his humane scruples to interrupt his duty. This notion of necessity overpowering will is a constant throughout the film, as well as the fine line between life and death. Bieri’s Corlette is characterised as much the same working stiff as those he hires for a deadly job, rather than a caricatured corporate type, and his hard, cynical edge shown when he sets the men on the mission reveals the impulsive strength of a survivor that has elevated him slightly: life in the world often demands indifference to its cruelties. Similarly, Sorcerer forces the viewer to temper identification with the heroes, who are all various forms of lowlife but who also all have their reasons, ranging from political idealism to a mere hope for a better life, and noting how their individual crimes are woven into a landscape of such crimes committed by people better at covering their asses. Friedkin’s prognosticating gifts pushed him to make one of his quartet a felonious banker and a terrorist, who in the context of today stand in many minds as the twin existential threats of the current age.
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Friedkin depicts the rage of the locals as a truckload of their dead is brought into town, gruesomely charred and ruined, sparking a riot even soldiers can’t quell. Later, Friedkin interestingly contrasts the Conradian presumptions of the story’s concept of inherent brutalism with a tribal man who walks the highway and happily teases Scanlon by running alongside and in front of his truck, oblivious to Scanlon’s alarm at the potential danger he’s causing in his gleeful attitude. Meanwhile Corlette learns the ubiquitous El Presidente, whose image stares out from the many political posters plastered about Porvenir, fancies himself too much of a liberal to shut down the protests and aid the company. Another original touch of Green’s script was to make the explosion that devastates the oil well in the first place an act of sabotage, committed by a guerrilla army haunting the forests. When the drivers later encounter a band of the guerrillas, they prove uninterested in the lives of the kinds of people they should theoretically be fighting for, planning only to rob and kill them and forcing Scanlon and Nilo to fight for their lives. But just as the drivers piece together two working vehicles out of a range of abandoned company vehicles, the men are given new life by their desperate chance, and Manzon shows the skills that elevated him as he coolly presents their case to Corlette for more money and for identity proofs that will give them status. The four anxious, untrusting, antagonistic men are forced to band together and find something like comradeship as they take on the obstacles fate places in their way. They name their trucks “Lazaro” and “Sorcerer”—tilts at fate evoking powers over life and death—and let others cover them with magic symbols.
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Once the trucks hit the road, Sorcerer unveils its full, hypnotic power as its assailed protagonists traverse narrow mountain roads and plunge through dark, enclosing jungle, photographed with astonishing verve by fired first cinematographer Dick Bush and his replacement John M. Stephens. A storm rises, churning the world into a maelstrom of blinding water. When Scanlon and Nilo reach an almost metaphysically charged fork in the road, they find the direction sign toppled. When they ask an old man for directions to the town of Poza Rica, he answers, “Poza Rica is dead,” invoking the old meaning of the lyrics of the song “Loch Lomond,” where the low road means death. The film’s justifiably most famous sequence is an epic passage where both trucks are forced to cross an aged, crumbling suspension bridge made from rope and wooden planks. The spectacle of the heavy, grunting trucks trying to cross this rickety structure resembles a hippopotamus trying to tightrope walk, the threat of every jolt nauseating. The drenching rain, swirling waters, and sickening swaying of the bridge make it seem as if the whole earth has come alive to try to shake these persistent fools off its shoulder. The feeling becomes all the stronger when a broken tree branch suddenly crashes into the bridge and rips into Manzon’s body like some suddenly rearing witch’s claws; Kassem barely manages to hang onto the bridge as he falls through a gap whilst directing Manzon across. The bridge gives way literally at the last second, and Freidkin jump cuts to the following day, the fate of the duo momentarily ambiguous until they pull in behind Scanlon and Nilo’s truck, which has been halted by a less intimidating, but even more problematic barrier: a gigantic felled tree lying across the road.
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Nilo laughs in hearty hopelessness whilst Scanlon furiously, hysterically tries to chop a new path. Kassem, however, has the idea to rig up a device to set off one of the dynamite boxes and blow the tree to matchsticks, the apotheosis of the four men’s assertion of their intelligence and teamwork. Fate, however, is a real bitch: as they bond over the sentimental value of Manzon’s watch, the keepsake of another life, Manzon and Kassem are blown to smithereens when their truck busts a tyre and careens off the road, setting off their load. The guerrillas, attracted by the blast, hold up Scanlon and Nilo. Scanlon bluffs for time, pretending they carry supplies, whilst Nilo pretends to be sick, whilst nursing his revolver. Nilo guns down several soldiers whilst Scanlon bashes another to death with a shovel, only for Nilo to get a bullet in his own gut for his pains. Nilo slowly bleeds to death on the floor of the cab as Scanlon traverses the remaining distance to the well: the two men, each bitterly aware of the other’s hostility at the outset, rave about their intention to take their newfound riches to Managua and shack up with whores, but Nilo dies, leaving Scanlon alone. Although less spectacular than the bridge sequence, the film’s most stunning moments come as Scanlon drives the last few lonely miles, and has an agonisingly surreal freak-out at the very outer limits of liminal experience. Scanlon’s psyche disintegrates as he drives saddled with a corpse and a load of death across high mountain reaches, a lunarlike plane of perverse rock forms and spectral white dust in sickly blue moonlight.
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The flurrying edits here negate time and space, fragments of memory and hallucination blending in chaotic dialogue. Double-exposures render Scanlon a ghost in his own life, dissolving into the lightning boiling in a cloud as if about to join the natural elements, or into the perverse forms of rock around him, as if exploring an alien planet. Blood gushes over Manzon’s watch in the rubble of his death site in rhyme with his dead criminal partners under the rain of the busted fire hydrant. Nilo’s wretched laugh echoes over shots of his dead white face. Finally Scanlon runs out of petrol short of his goal, and so makes the rest of the distance carrying a box of the gelignite in his hand, collapsing like a puppet once he reaches the glow of the firelight, the blazing well a squiggle of infernal power leading him on. Scanlon has made it, but the victory has cost him too much.
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Clouzot was reputed for his unexpected and often jarringly bleak endings, and The Wages of Fear came readymade with one. Mario, driving home in triumph, swerves his truck on the road as if dancing in joy, only to lose control and crash. Friedkin and Green’s take on the same ending is quieter and, in some ways, even darker, though possibly also less shocking and wrenching in its inferences as a result. As Scanlon sits in the bar in Porvenir with Corlette, rich with the shares of his dead fellows and armed with a local passport, a taxi pulls up outside bringing the assassins hired by Ricci to extract his debt. Clouzot’s last image was of Mario’s bloodied hand, still gripping his ticket from the Paris Metro line: he at least died with the future still before him. Friedkin slowly zooms in on Scanlon’s face as he realises forlornly that all his efforts have not bought him a new beginning after all—and stands to start a sadly dignifying dance with the withered barmaid. The arrival of death at the door only confirms what he knows: Scanlon has realised that for all his effort and triumph, he still has nowhere to go.