We look at the stellar career of the late William Friedkin and in particular his underappreciated masterpiece, Sorcerer…
William Friedkin has sadly passed away but left behind a resume filled with masterful cinema including several films which redefined genres. When it comes to cinema, there are some filmmakers who have never quite had the level of reverence they deserve. Friedkin falls under that category. Coming during an era that saw directors like Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg creating groundbreaking and important cinema during the New Hollywood era, Friedkin was right in the mix with his own inimitable style.
Friedkin’s early career was certainly eclectic, reflecting some of the experimental nature of New Hollywood with Good Times (which had Sonny and Cher spoofing iconic movie scenes), The Birthday Party and a key, if slightly unheralded moment in gay cinema, The Boys in the Band (based on the popular play). Moving into the 70s though, Friedkin seemed to shift up a gear as the young upstart hit a three-film run which marked the peak of his career.
It started with The French Connection, a grimy and gritty cop thriller which saw Gene Hackman as an unorthodox and ruthless cop, partnered with Roy Scheider’s slightly more post-modern and considered cop. It was a key moment in New Hollywood action cinema, complete with a downbeat ending and moral ambiguity. The French Connection is pumped full of blistering energy, from Friedkin’s docu-style approach to the camera work, the naturalistic performances and the brilliantly cut, immersive set pieces. Then, of course, you have the iconic headline car chase sequence which is still gripping to this day. Friedkin won the Oscar for best director. He’d produced something fresh, and stylistically exciting in a way very few directors (Sam Peckinpah another example) of the era had to that point.
If The French Connection had a similar impact to Bullitt and Bonnie and Clyde, which preceded it, then The Exorcist had an impact that was next level. It marked the most pop culturally significant horror picture since Hitchcock’s Psycho, billed as the most terrifying film ever and one which began to attach lore regarding its power. Reports of people fainting, even dying watching the terror before them gave the film an intimidating presence in the theatres. Despite the billing, the film did more than just scare audiences. It enthralled them and for the most part, critics too. The film captured the attention of the Academy too, which then and to this day is a rarity in the horror genre. Friedkin was nominated for an Oscar (the film won two and had a further seven nominations) and was firmly established as one of the best and brightest of New Hollywood’s young directors.
We’ll come back to the third of his immense triple whammy. Going into the 80s, Friedkin jumped between genres and was never afraid to try something almost doomed to failure, like Cruising which saw Al Pacino as an undercover cop going on a deep dive into the New York gay scene after a serial killer begins targeting gay men. He then ramped up the style, without entirely losing substance with To Live and Die in LA. He mirrored Scorsese and Coppola to some extent, as they all had eclectic films and often fascinating box office disappointments throughout the 80s.
Friedkin’s standing was falling faster, however, and he couldn’t quite recover it in the 90s and beyond but regardless of box office appeal or a lack of cult films (whilst Scorsese was often making films 5 years ahead of the curve which eventually caught on, like After Hours) Friedkin could still surprise people and show that master’s touch (something which seemed to elude Coppola in the new century). After a forgettable 90s, he hit a nice roll with the simple but effective The Hunted, Bug, a cult horror film that took 5-10 years to find love and Killer Joe (a film which was a forerunner to the McConnaissance).
Back to that third film of Friedkin’s three film peak, and this film is a game changer for the wrong reasons. If The Exorcist had a massive impact on cinema by effectively popularising demonic possession horror and exorcism horror, then Sorcerer would mark the most major nail in New Hollywood’s coffin.
Though the era began in the early 60s and ended in the early 80s, many consider the key years of the era to be between 1967 and 1977, bookended by Bonnie and Clyde and Friedkin’s Sorcerer. His nihilistic, dark and brooding reimagining of Henri-Georges Clouzet’s Wages of Fear, is a cinematic masterpiece. Yet it still remains undervalued. People have discovered it or reappraised it in the last 20 years, increasing its standing but it still falls behind other films of the era in discussion. All thanks to a tiny film you may have heard of called Star Wars.
Friedkin probably never set out to make blockbusters, but the success of The French Connection and especially The Exorcist could be deemed surprising given the respective styles and subject matter. Certainly, in the case of The Exorcist, it’s still arguably the greatest blockbuster horror, achieving the kind of box office results the genre wouldn’t see again for decades. There’s big success and there’s cult success but it was something else. Once again, Friedkin merely set out to make a mature, multi-layered and gripping cinematic work, but Sorcerer was almost doomed to fail. It was a film with a bigger budget than Star Wars that not only had to contend with the escapist fantasy of Luke Skywalker but ironically, also The Exorcist 2 which came out a week before Friedkin’s own follow-up film.
The Exorcist 2 had nothing like the same box office appeal of the first film (and dreadful reviews) but it still made a respectable amount of money and ate into Sorcerer. Not quite like Star Wars did, however, which effectively ruled the year, spending weeks on end at the top of the box office charts. It was clear, audiences wanted an escape from death and downbeat endings and cinema which had hope and grander spectacle. Suddenly, the 70s was shifting from aspiring auteurs pushing boundaries and making mature, complex cinema, to what were historically B pictures becoming the new trend (which has remained until this day). A New Hope helped to birth an era ruled by Steven Spielberg and saw Friedkin effectively falling on his sword with his sweaty and grizzled magnum opus (which cost twice as much to make than Star Wars).
Bad luck aside, the heaving budget and mixed critical response were only exacerbated by an indifferent audience. People weren’t going to see it. Was it a year too late? A few years too early? All that aside, Sorcerer is a film regarded as one of his own personal favourites. Though many will directly compare it to Clouzet’s masterpiece, which also featured a group of antiheroes making a treacherous transport full of volatile dynamite, both films are unique beasts. Both are equally worthy and masterfully constructed. Increasingly there are many who believe Sorcerer is Friedkin’s crowning achievement, even compared to the two preceding films which have entered the cinema lexicon more readily.
Sorcerer sees a group of displaced outlaws (including Roy Scheider and Bruno Cremer) escaping justice and/or certain death back in the States. In a backwater South American village, they’re all in need of quick cash and forged residential documents to find a safe haven. The film drips with sweat from the moment we find ourselves in Porvenir. By this point, we’ve had a lengthy set-up to establish what brought these miscreants to this point. The beefy openings for each main transporter were something of a point of contention, but in an age of consistent 2 and a half/3 hour blockbuster films, that added elaboration has become more palatable in time (and isn’t without brutal and visceral sequences). There’s a distinct bluntness to the consequences and violence depicted in Sorcerer and it’s a film that ratchets up the tension from the off and rarely lets up. Death feels as if it lurks around every corner for these men, even before you throw dynamite and treacherous roads into the mix.
Friedkin puts these men on a journey to hell. The film is a nihilistic beast but certainly, in the case of Scanlon (Scheider), there’s a feeling that he’s in a perpetual state of half-resignation to the fate his life choices will afford him. Yet he’s desperately clinging on for survival with each scrape through. We feel the arduousness of the journey, not merely from the film’s clammy discomfort with our characters persistently dripping in sweat, but also from the dust and dirt that is caked onto their faces.
The journey is taken on slipshod vehicles that are a knife edge from the scrapyard, wholly unsuitable to transport such a volatile (and explosive) cargo. Valves fire steam, steel snaps and there’s always a problem to solve on those trucks…and then there are the roads (or lack thereof). Sure, if you’ve driven in High Wycombe, you’d probably take the almost impassable terrain of Sorcerer, but be it grimace-inducing mountain passes or the infamous river bridge crossing sequence, this is a journey that’s born of nightmare.
The cast was made up of mostly character actors (the lack of a ‘star’ name was also deemed a contributing factor to the box office failure) was superb. It was Roy Scheider’s most intensely gripping performance, deserving of wider acclaim and recognition but doomed to be (at least initially) overlooked as Hollywood cast its eyes on lighter fare and inspiring characters, and with a reverence to the rising poster stars of the time. Even Jaws wasn’t enough to convince execs that Scheider was star material (Friedkin himself lobbied for Steve McQueen for Sorcerer).
In retrospect though, those worn faces and ragged characters benefit from the attached cast feeling decidedly undazzling. Atop all this, with Friedkin’s watertight direction, there’s the pulsating score from Tangerine Dream which propels the often excruciatingly tense action sequences which were all captured in camera. The fact is, a modern-day remake would resort to CGI to creature its sequences, and undoubtedly lack the gift for tension that Friedkin could create on a whim. He was a master of the art who will be greatly missed.
Tom Jolliffe is an award-winning screenwriter and passionate cinephile. He has a number of films out around the world, including When Darkness Falls, Renegades (Lee Majors and Danny Trejo) and War of The Worlds: The Attack (Vincent Regan), with more coming soon including Cinderella’s Revenge (Natasha Henstridge) and The Baby in the Basket (Maryam d’Abo and Paul Barber). Find more info at the best personal site you’ll ever see here.