Sorcerer: Bleak Magic

Essays—

Jun 24, 2025

What does a filmmaker do after directing back-to-back triumphs—one the winner of five Oscars, and the other the most successful and influential horror movie of its era? The one-two punch of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) left William Friedkin euphoric but indecisive: He had no idea what to do next, he wrote in his 2013 memoir, The Friedkin Connection, and he was too busy enjoying his newfound fame and fortune to figure it out. He was interested in Gerald Walker’s novel Cruising, but decided against making another gay-themed drama so soon after The Boys in the Band (1970). (He would change his mind a few years later.) Ultimately, with a deal in place to direct his first film for Universal Pictures, he landed on something more personal: a dream project that he felt he’d built up enough goodwill to pursue.

From that dream erupted the brutal, nerve-jangling existential nightmare of Sorcerer (1977), an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s 1950 suspense novel, The Wages of Fear, about four down-on-their-luck Europeans transporting two truckloads of nitroglycerin across perilous jungle terrain. Arnaud’s tale had already been filmed before, brilliantly; indeed, Friedkin had long considered Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) a major influence, and even went to the trouble of securing Clouzot’s blessing for Sorcerer. But Friedkin conceived his film as more readaptation than remake, and he meant to put his own mark on the material. Where Clouzot had made a model of classical screw-tightening suspense, Friedkin sought to grind the viewer’s nose in the muck, to infuse the mechanics of genre with the same rough-hewn realism that had made The French Connection so grittily persuasive. Sorcerer, Friedkin felt certain, would surpass that achievement; it would be his magnum opus—the most viscerally transporting and uncompromising film of his career.

Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green (an Oscar-nominated cowriter on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch) recast the four men as four scoundrels, all on the run from different parts of the world and brought together in Porvenir, a fictional backwater in an unspecified, oil-rich Latin American country. It’s fitting that, of all the choices Friedkin could have made, he wound up telling a story that treats the very notion of choice as a delusion. Even before these fugitives embark on their journey, their every move conspires against them—and once the rubber meets the perilously serpentine road, every split-second decision and frenzied turn of the wheel brings them one agonizing step closer to ruin.

Arnaud’s novel chronicled an epic test of endurance; Sorcerer, in effect, became one. “It turned out to be the most difficult, frustrating, and dangerous film I’ve ever made,” Friedkin wrote, and indeed, every behind-the-scenes account of Sorcerer reads like an inexorable descent into moviemaking hell, analogous to the travails of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979). Friedkin wooed three major stars—Steve McQueen, Marcello Mastroianni, and Lino Ventura—all of whom dropped out, one after the other. Plans to film in Ecuador were scrapped after Paramount Pictures agreed to cofinance the film with Universal, at which point shooting moved to the Dominican Republic, then practically owned by Paramount’s parent company, Gulf and Western Industries. (The irony of a resource-extraction conglomerate funding a movie about the sins of American oil imperialism was hardly lost on Friedkin, who planted a Gulf and Western corporate photo in a crucial scene, causing one executive to have, in Green’s words, “a shit hemorrhage.”)

Once filming began, with a new cast in place—anchored by Roy Scheider, whom Friedkin had worked with on The French Connection—the plagues descended. Technical glitches necessitated costly reshoots. Crew members were hospitalized or sent home with food poisoning, gangrene, and malaria. As the budget swelled, a crucial river dried up, jeopardizing the film’s most ambitious sequence, involving a rickety suspension bridge. The bridge was moved to Mexico’s Papaloapan River, but the change of scenery brought fresh obstacles: at one point, Friedkin’s arrival in a remote village triggered a mass exodus among deeply religious locals, who feared the man who had made The Exorcist. What more evidence of a cursed production could there be?

Through it all, Friedkin worked like a man obsessed, as if he had imbibed the madness of his characters’ mission. The fatalism of that mission rebounded on the finished movie itself. Sorcerer opened in June 1977, trailing bad buzz from its grueling shoot, hobbled by harsh reviews, and—in perhaps the worst of its many misfortunes—arriving in theaters in the wake of Star Wars. While that movie was still packing cinemas around the country, Friedkin’s film died a swift box-office death. Sorcerer didn’t end his career—more films, Cruising (1980) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) notably among them, were still ahead—but it cost him his deal at Universal and dealt his reputation a blow from which it never fully recovered.

Seen today, the failure of Sorcerer looks like a grim prophecy of where the film industry would be headed in the years to come. It signaled that the creative ambitions of the New Hollywood, and its indulgence of stubborn renegade auteurs, had been cast aside for a new and dispiriting blockbuster ethos. Decades later, that ethos is still with us: a Hollywood dominated by digitally smoothed, effects-encrusted moviemaking, where every backdrop looks fake (even the real ones) and action sequences carry no physical weight. It’s a wretched landscape, and Sorcerer positively towers over it. To watch the film now, from its electric opening moments through its gaspingly bleak denouement, is to encounter something more than just a magnificent ruin or an object of cultish reclamation: a thwarted masterwork that is thwarted no longer.

Friedkin originally wanted to call the film Ballbreaker. He wisely reconsidered, though perhaps not wisely enough: as a title, Sorcerer proved cryptic and unmarketable. But if time has vindicated the film’s greatness, it has also immortalized that unorthodox name, which Friedkin meant to evoke “the evil wizard of fate.” It also suggests a supernatural lineage with The Exorcist, something Sorcerer announces with its very first shot: the monstrous face of a stone-carved idol, whose bulging eyes and bared teeth turn out to be the headlights and grille of a truck. The connection is driven home by a gripping twenty-five-minute prologue that conjures a furiously globe-trotting evil.

Death is a stealth protagonist from the early moment in a hotel room in Veracruz, Mexico, where a fedora-hatted assassin, Nilo (Francisco Rabal), shoots an unknown target and vanishes. A whirlwind of violence is set in motion: The camera tears through the streets of Jerusalem, where a Palestinian militant, Kassem (Amidou), blows up a bank and, following a confrontation with Israeli forces, is the lone perpetrator to slip away. From there, the story cools its heels for a spell in Paris, where Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer), an investment banker, hits the road to avoid facing fraud charges. The prologue concludes in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Jackie Scanlon (Scheider), a getaway driver for an Irish American gang, survives a horrific car crash and flees the country to escape retaliation from a rival mob. Friedkin captures these moments with a jaggedly propulsive, documentary-style realism, amped by muscular handheld camera movements and hard, slamming edits. (The shoot itself was not without its guerrilla-cinema tactics: while in Jerusalem, the director heard of an actual bombing that had taken place nearby—and immediately rushed over to film the aftermath.)

Violence is even more the order of the day in Porvenir. One by one, Jackie, Victor, Kassem, and Nilo resurface in this remote shantytown of dilapidated huts, squalid barracks, rubble-strewn roads, and free-roaming livestock. Three of the men take jobs in the nearby American oil fields, toiling alongside the locals under dehumanizing conditions. On a good day, only one worker gets crushed by a falling pipe; on a bad day, rebel forces blow up an oil well, sending many men to their agonizing deaths and unleashing an Old Testament–worthy pillar of fire. In one extraordinarily wrenching sequence, Friedkin, pushing observational realism to its limits, captures a mass outpouring of rage and grief: charred, plastic-wrapped bodies are borne aloft; vehicles are smashed and set alight; and for one moment, the narrative machinery grinds to a halt, drowned out by the cries of the bereaved. But even amid such man-made horror, an incongruous natural beauty persists: Friedkin and his chief cinematographer, John M. Stephens, can scarcely contain their awe at the visual majesty of their Dominican locations, which never appear more impossibly lush and verdant than when juxtaposed with encroaching flames.

Friedkin takes in the banana-republic politics at a glance: no assistance to the oil company is forthcoming from El Presidente, who cultivates a liberal image (“Unidos Hacia El Futuro!” his face declares from posters plastered everywhere) that would be jeopardized by any exercise of pro-American force. The only hope of extinguishing the well fire is with improperly stored, highly volatile crates of nitroglycerin that must be transported by truck from 218 miles away—a suicide mission, but one that pays handsomely, and thus a potential lifeline for a few bad men. A driving-test montage marvelously distills character into action: Victor is chosen for his steady assurance, Kassem for letting nothing stand in his way, and Jackie for his practiced skill behind the wheel, recent crash notwithstanding. A terse camaraderie develops as the three, joined by a German fugitive calling himself Marquez (Karl John), work together to repair two enormous rust-bucket trucks—tightening bolts, replacing engine parts, testing batteries, attaching mirrors, painting hoods (Friedkin christened the vehicles Lazaro and Sorcerer, the latter after the 1967 Miles Davis album), and, finally, securing their lethal cargo. Backed by Tangerine Dream’s momentously agitated strumming, it is hypnotic physical-process filmmaking—pungent enough that you can practically smell the sweat and motor oil, and richly satisfying as a portrait of men at work.

But who are these men? A haunting nonanswer of sorts can be found in an earlier Paris scene between Victor and his wife, Blanche (Anne-Marie Deschodt), who pointedly declares, “No one is just anything.” Her casually philosophical assertion applies especially to Victor, a fisherman’s son who has clawed his way, clearly none too honestly, into France’s moneyed class. But the line reverberates throughout Porvenir, where Jackie, Victor, and Kassem, all hiding out under Latino aliases, deflect any attempt to get a handle on who they are. Friedkin may front-load the backstories, but he does so to almost perversely unrevealing ends: whatever disparities of class, nationality, and personality exist among these four men seem fundamentally irrelevant in a situation where necessity becomes the mother of self-reinvention.

The interchangeability of the men becomes literal in one of the film’s most startling developments: right before the journey begins, Nilo murders Marquez in cold blood and takes his place in Jackie’s truck. Other than from Kassem, who had befriended Marquez, Nilo’s actions elicit little outrage; this mission has no time for mourning or moral objections. And so Sorcerer surges ahead, with thunderous momentum, through a series of set pieces that inspire awe at not only the craziness of Friedkin’s ambitions but also the precision of his art. Every micro-shift of the crates in the back, and every log that snaps under the wheel, unleashes a frisson of terror; by the time the trucks arrive at the bridge, Friedkin is all but controlling your breathing. The sequence that follows is one of the most harrowing of his career: beams buckle and ropes sway under bitterly lashing rains; gnarled branches attack like witches’ claws; and in time, and not a moment too soon, the bridge collapses, taking the last of your nerves with it.

Just as a measure of teamwork gets both trucks past that obstacle, so an ingenious bit of collaborative problem-solving—led by Kassem, the explosives expert—removes an enormous fallen tree from their path. Yet it may be Friedkin’s darkest joke that, after rigorously avoiding any trace of sentimentality for the better part of two hours, he allows tentative bonds to form—only to be just as suddenly ruptured. A fond moment of reminiscence precipitates a lethal explosion; a gunshot wound leads to a cackling exchange of last rites. Jackie, always the lone survivor, descends into hallucinatory madness. He drives until he can drive no more and then carries a single crate of nitroglycerin for the last two miles of his journey, set against a strikingly arid landscape (shot in the Bisti badlands of northwestern New Mexico) whose utter desolation mirrors his own.

The character of Jackie was closely modeled on Fred C. Dobbs, the ruthless, paranoid American gold-seeker played by Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); Scheider, no stranger to being compared to Bogart, even wears what looks like Dobbs’s signature rumpled hat. The extent of Jackie’s own twisted greed emerges when, believing two of his associates to be dead, he immediately salivates over the prospect of “double shares.” So why, at the end, does Jackie—given not just double but quadruple shares—look so lost? As he dances with a barmaid, Agrippa (Rosario Almontes), is he stirred by a glimmer of remorse? Or does he realize that no payday can compensate for a head full of trauma and a future spent looking over his shoulder? The possibilities swirl; the wizard of fate approaches. To the end, Friedkin maintained that he never made a greater film than Sorcerer. To the end, he was right.

Sorcerer: Bleak Magic

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