Finn Morse
The idea of a movie standing the test of time is hardly attributed to the state of its premiere. Regardless of the film’s word-of-mouth reputation, its contention during awards season, or royalties at the box office, the work’s defining attribute is the quality of the work itself. If an audience can watch a movie fifty years after its release and recognize its weight in gold, that is a defining sign of brilliance. Forty-nine years ago, at the time of Sorcerer, American New Hollywood director William Friedkin was rising to the top of the charts again and again. Friedkin directed a pair of movies in the 1970s that respectively turned the world on its head. The French Connection from 1971 was a suspenseful cop thriller that took the world by storm. The film was awarded the Best Picture trophy—among four others—at the 44th Academy Awards.
On top of his breakout success, William Friedkin directed The Exorcist in 1973, breathing new life into the horror genre. The Exorcist secured 10 Academy Award nominations, more than any other horror movie until Sinners in 2026. Friedkin was flying higher than ever under the watchful eye of the Hollywood machine. He wanted the world to know that he was on top and that he was here to stay. This would prove the opposite come the release of Friedkin’s next feature.
Sorcerer is one of the greatest adventure movies of all time. All these decades later, we can still feel its heat. The film follows four miscellaneous fugitive men hiding in the jungle shambles of capitalist-torn Porvenir, Chile. Under aliases, criminals Dominguez (Roy Scheider), Serrano (Bruno Cremer), and Martinez (Amidou) are hired by a local oil company for a high-risk, high-reward transport job. The catch? Their cargo is temperamental dynamite. This job—and this jungle—are stacked against them. The criminals must band together to beat the odds and walk away with their pockets full.
Sorcerer fuses a genre-oriented adventure thriller with a subtle sociopolitical critique of the effects capitalism has on underprivileged communities. The dialogue is minimal, most of the screenplay consisting of mere shot details. It succeeds by wordlessly creating a tense atmosphere, elevated by its writhing jungle environment, pounding synthwaves, and expert direction.
As an adaptation of both the 1950 novel The Wages of Fear and the classic 1953 film of the same name, Sorcerer aims to accomplish different goals than the original material. In emphasizing the rockiness of the Chilean mountains, Fear sought to centralize its story on its main characters. Taking place primarily in the jungle instead of on a barren rockscape, Sorcerer makes said jungle into its own character. As a result of this change in setting, we identify much less with Sorcerer’s characters, and more with its environment. The audience already feels the heat and the tension brought about by the humid climate. Trapping the main characters in the rainforest lends itself to even more anger—that of the jungle itself.
Several scenes scrutinize the effect capitalism has had on Porvenir, lineating the struggling people to the angry jungle. The town is dilapidated, its workers and resources ferried into an oil drilling operation. A disaster at a company’s private drilling site causes the deaths of several local workers. The scene of the workers’ burned bodies returned to their outraged community is one of the movie’s most important images. The scene holds little plot relevance, but stands out for its raw emotion from the environment it takes place in. It instills tragedy as much as it does unrest. These people died for the same corporate machine that drains the jungle.
The effects capitalism has had on other characters is conveyed visually, the criminals’ connection to timely American values is unbreakable. Dominguez, freshly arrived in Porvenir, sits alone in the town’s diner. Of all things, he stares longingly at an advertisement of a beachgoing lady reaching for a Coca-Cola bottle. The only familiar escape this fugitive of America has from his current situation is to fetishize a product. This romanticises the capitalist state that landed him here in the first place, one that preaches money as survival. Wordlessly, we can see that Dominguez is a man programmed to track down money no matter the cost. Even after one of their four drivers is murdered, Dominguez and Serrano just conscript the driver’s killer to sign up. These men don’t have morals, their only values lying with their wages at the end of the tunnel.
Sorcerer also sports an iconic score, courtesy of the electronic new age band Tangerine Dream. Further up on the family tree of Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, Tangerine Dream’s musical style relies on the ‘brown note’ motif. The low-pitched frequency rings through entire scenes, designed to build tension. The synths in Sorcerer loom over plenty of the film’s runtime, constantly upping the ante for an eventual chaotic disaster. When the direction and sound design aren’t entertaining the audience, this exceptional score does the trick.
One example of utilizing this music to great effect is in the car construction scene. In it, our protagonists tinker and mechanize two huge trucks on which to embark on their adventure. One truck is painted with the name “Peligro” and the other “Sorcerer.” The trucks—much like the jungle—become characters themselves, shining each headlight as they spring to life. Tangerine Dream’s music almost serves as a lightning bolt to ‘Frankenstein’ these broken down cars into undeath.
The vehicles “Peligro” and “Sorcerer” represent the capitalists and their venture into parts unprepared for human contact. The sound design again aids the wordless storytelling, the crunch under the trucks sounding like boots on hallowed ground. But as ethically questionable their task is, the audience roots for these fugitives. They’re criminals no doubt, and their misdeeds are left untried. But seeing the impossible hoops they jump through to complete this errand, we sit wondering if they’ve earned some relief. Each bead of sweat is emphasized with warm color correction, as is each rain drop with a deep green-blue tint.
Probably the most memorable image from Sorcerer as a whole is in its showrunning bridge navigation scene. The adventurers have no choice but to cross a flimsy bridge in the middle of a tropical rainstorm. The terrain and the machines are at war with each other, the music notably omitted to emphasize the sound. Thundering rain beats down upon both trucks, nearly throwing them into the water. The audience is suspended at the edge of their seats with the creaking of the ropes. Tension built throughout the second half of the film comes to a climax. Can these men really tame this beast of a jungle?
Another great scene that combines sound and vision is the tree explosion scene. After that rainstorm, an enormous felled timber blocks the next stretch of path. With no time to cut through the wood by hand, the revolutionary character Martinez pays off his bomb-ready prologue scene. The visual intensity of rigging the explosion is elevated by another absence of music. The ensuing explosion scene makes the wait for Chekov’s dynamite well worth its while.
In its final act, Sorcerer topples the towers it built over the last hour and a half. The anxiety of those crates of dynamite sitting in the back seat comes to a peak. One bump on the road suddenly blows up half the cast. A standoff with raiders leads to fatal gunshots, all at the expense of earning back the dollars these men gambled and lost in the big city. Much like these characters, Friedkin had the odds stacked against him in 1977, in the beginning of blockbuster season.
Sorcerer was a tough sell to the moviegoing audiences of the late 1970s. By this point in history, the world had already caved in favor of the summer blockbuster, culled by Jaws (1975) from director Steven Spielberg. Immediately, one could surmise that Friedkin aimed to imitate Jaws, with Sorcerer featuring yet another Roy Scheider adventure into the unknown. Even though Sorcerer isn’t an original screenplay, adaptational changes made it enough of a different beast to hold its own. Friedkin knew it was “go big or go home” in the industry from this point onward. Unfortunately, somebody was going even bigger, to a galaxy far, far away.
Director George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) released the month before Sorcerer, drawing in the cultural zeitgeist and ending Friedkin’s reign. Audiences wanted something merchandisable and never before seen, easily marketed and capitalized upon. The world was already changing to bring in that marketability of the 1980s, leaving filmmaking talents like Friedkin behind in the dust. Thankfully, he made a legendary adventure movie to indirectly begin the end of Hollywood’s greatest era.
Sorcerer and its legacy endure to this day, eventually finding its way into critic circles and, recently, The Criterion Collection. The movie’s subliminal critiques of how capitalism topples the natural order are shown through its filmmaking merits and displayed talent. Its synths are hypnotizing, its script simple but effective. And, while its characters aren’t as digestible as they are in The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer undoubtedly justifies itself as a remake. You can’t tame the beast, and you’re a fool to even try.
