The Sorcerer (Sorcerer, 1977) is a movie from the lists of “the best movies of the 70s that you have never seen.” It is formally considered a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Fear Fee (1953) (starring Yves Montand), but it is not, and director William Friedkin also denies it. He and screenwriter Wally Green (Peckinpah’s “The Wild Gang”) did not even read the original book, because it was only in French. This is a film that competes with Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and is somewhat inspired by Vernon Herzog’s “Aguirre, The Wrath of God”. Many more questions are raised concerning the name of the film, because this is never a fantasy or an album by Miles Davis. But after all, Citizen Kane was originally called simply American. And the working title of the “Sorcerer” is an even more dubious “Ballbreaker”.
"Sorcerer" 1951 GMC M211
Sorcerer was the name of one of the 1951 GMC M211 trucks left after the Korean War. The second GMC M211 was named Lazaro, the Spanish version of the name Lazarus. These battered and restored trucks (they can be called rat-rods!) are also the main characters of this largely experimental film. In fact, Sorcerer is one of the best films about trucks and all fans of heavy machinery should appreciate not only the Convoy, but also the Sorcerer: a powerful scene with a rope bridge will make them tremble and cry with delight. All this was filmed without any CGI! Each truck fell off the bridge 5-6 times! Such a directorial approach made shooting pure madness, moreover, very expensive.
1951 GMC M211 "Lazarus"
The story is that when the bridge was built in the 1st location, it towered about 12 feet above the roaring river. But when they started shooting, the river dried up – for the first time ever! And they had to disassemble the bridge and rebuild it in another country, but the story of the river began to repeat itself. These and other vicissitudes made the shooting pure hell, the budget exceeded $ 20 million, the director quarreled with the entire crew, after finishing the work he came down with malaria, and the filming participants had the whole gentleman’s set from gangrene to other tropical diseases. It’s amazing how they got through it all and noone died.
Sorcerer was filmed for 2 years in 5 countries. Filming took place in New York, Paris, Jerusalem, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. The film takes place in the village of Porvenir, Nicaragua. At that time, the country was ruled by another dictator, Debile Anastasio Somoza, nicknamed Tachito “garbage dump”, who sold himself to the United States and gave national resources to plunder. Friedkin managed to criticize colonialism with the money given to him by the colonialists. When the terrorist attack was filming in Israel, there was a real terrorist attack, and the film crew went and captured the consequences of this tragedy. In New York, the real episode with the robbery of the church occurred not so far from the movie, and in order to achieve a perfectly shot scene of a car crash, at least 12 Plymouth Fury cars had to be ditched. Clint Eastwood, Lino Venturo, Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen and even Marcello Mastroiani were invited to the main role. However, eminent colleagues refused to go to shoot somewhere far away, and instead of them there was Roy Scheider, a former boxer with a broken nose, who, although being the star of Jaws and All That Jazz, was still not an A-list star. After the release of “The Sorcerer” in an interview, he said that people who go to cinemas would like to empathize or sympathize with the characters, which is hardly possible in the case of the Sorcerer, because the characters are initially presented from a negative point of view, and are not particularly revealed in the course of the story. Friedkin, on the other hand, did not remain in debt, believing that Scheider’s choice for the main role was his biggest mistake in his entire film career.
If the Friedkin’s film Exorcist is about the mystery of faith, then Sorcerer is about the mystery of fate, here she is a bad Sorcerer, evil fatum. It’s not about the roads we choose, but about the roads we don’t choose. These roads have already chosen their heroes, and even when they (not all) reach the end, it will not get better. The past path, challenges and sufferings will not become cleansing, but will be a black funnel, dragging deeper and deeper. Who decided to lie low in LatAm among former Nazis, working for an real Nazis, oil corporation, is unlikely to be able to get out on this journey to the end of the night in the mythical Ixtlan even for fabulous profits.
The pessimistic and gloomy path through the Latin American jungles and mountain ranges is accompanied by nervous ambient from German kraut-rockers Tangerine Dream. 200 miles with dynamite in the back, ready to detonate at any second – no other way than the road to hell? Sorcerer is a film that is creepy and sometimes existentially scary, and thus especially attractive. As one of the modern viewers responded: “I paid for a whole seat in the cinema, but I was sitting only on the edge of it.”
Yes, this is a movie. The last thing I liked just as much according to the recommendations of other site authors was Rodriguez’s Roadracers.
The film is about how two trucks are collected from trash and garbage, put three boxes of nitroglycerin in each of them and try to transport this case off-road, which MudRunner will envy.
The trucks are called the Sorcerer and Lazarus – their names are never mentioned in the film itself, and they can only be glimpsed in a couple of frames – they are written on the cabs of the cars. And if Lazarus looks plus or minus standard, then the Sorcerer with a Ford muzzle, a hood full of decorative slots, unusual headlights and other charms really resembles some kind of shamanic idol. The resemblance to the rock face, which just flaunts on the last screenshot in the article, is simply amazing. I even wonder if this muzzle was carved on purpose – or maybe the truck was built with an eye on this muzzle – or really just so coincidentally.
I will say that I didn’t read the article completely before viewing it, so I was really awesome when viewing it: How did they shoot it? After all, there was simply no such graphics in the 77th. I decided that the trucks had some kind of safety cables…
now, when I found out that each truck fell into the water five or six times… In general, it’s really amazing just the fact that no one died. The moment of crossing the bridge is the very shots when even knowing that this is just a movie, that the actors are not threatened by explosives in the back and so on, the jaw still drops. Just because the very fact that someone was still able to cross this absolutely suicidal bridge on a huge truck under tons of water is amazing, literally amazing.
The music deserves a special mention, as it is definitely one of the best works of Tangerine Dream. Although I haven’t watched the movie up to this point, the songs Search and Betrayal have been in my collection for ten years.
Really a movie that everyone should watch. With a speed of no more than 50 kilometers per hour, the Sorcerer and Lazarus generate much more adrenaline and tension than any of the Fast & Furious. Fans of Convoy and heavy trucks are recommended to an extreme extent, fans of Spintires, MudRunner and any off-road games, in principle, are generally required to watch.