‘Managua… shit, there’s no way I can go to Managua...’
William Friedkin is best known as one of the New Hollywood directors who changed the face of American cinema in the ’70s. While The French Connection and The Exorcist are his best-known works, Sorcerer is one of his most infamous. Shot over 10 months in the Dominican Republic, the shoot was legendary for going over schedule, over budget and being constantly dangerous. Friedkin fired five production managers and one director of photography over the course of the shoot, but the final result is something that remains utterly unique when viewed today…
We begin with a prologue that explains why four man have been forced to leave their home countries and move to a remote village in South America. Roy Schieder plays Jackie Scanlon, a man on the run from the mafia, Bruno Cremer is Serrano, an investment banker from Paris caught up in a corruption scandal, Francisco Rabal portrays Nilo, a Mexican professional assassin, and Amidou rounds out the cast as Martinez, a political activist with a penchant for explosives. Together, they are tasked with transporting many gallons of unstable nitroglycerin across an unfamiliar and hostile landscape.
Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s excursion to the jungle in Apocalypse Now, Friedkin fancied his own journey into the heart of darkness. While the film flopped upon release (mainly because it came out at the same time as Star Wars), there is no denying that Sorcerer is a potent and often jaw-dropping slice of gonzo cinema. Eschewing dialogue and character development, Friedkin wanted to tell a story using mostly visuals, pure cinema as Hitchcock called it, and while this isn’t normally a style that I love, here, the set pieces are so captivating, so downright batshit crazy, that it’s impossible not to get caught up in it all. The bridge sequence alone is worth the admission fee, as is the sensational conclusion.
Sorcerer is a true one-off. A throwback to a time when the director had the power to fulfil whatever mad whim or desire they came up with, and the studios would go along with it. This freedom didn’t last, could never last, but Friedkin’s work during this period is rightly considered some of the most important in cinema history, and Sorcerer is a big part of that.
