Movie Mahal

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William Friedkin’s 1977 remake of Cluzot’s The Wages of Fear is one of the most atmospheric Hollywood films of its era. Arguably Friedkin’s best film after The Exorcist, Sorcerer was for a very long time a footnote in the end of an era – the New Hollywood one, including films like Heaven’s Gate. Maligned and dismissed, Friedkin’s feverishly tactile work is one of those impossible ‘how did they do that’ films.

I’ve not read much around the production but I can imagine it must have been one hell of a crazy shoot. Pretty much all of it was shot on location in the Dominican Republic and the fictional village of Porvenir, somewhere in the jungles of South America, is visualized as a purgatory sewer that attracts a group of condemned fugitives. It is a crippled milieu in the throes of what seems to be a tyrannical despot military rule, a banana republic, in which an American oil company operates with impunity, aided by a corrupt government and insalubrious officials that populate the village.

Friedkin’s choice to imagine the fatalistic road journey to transport nitro is an audaciously edited grim odyssey chock full of delicious montages that are juxtaposed to a deliriously hypnotic synth score by the legendary Tangerine Dream. The crux is the bridge sequence; a gripping Herzogian nightmare in which elemental forces seek to engulf and entomb those who dare to cross a sacred threshold. A meaty, pulsating neo-noir thriller with a supernatural fervour that feels less Hollywood and more European art cinema, Sorcerer is a doom-laden treatise on the wretchedness of capitalism, despondency and labour.