Imagine if you will opening a movie the same year that Star Wars hit the silver screen. Nineteen seventy-seven was the year, and I’ll bet you can’t name a movie other than Star Wars that debuted that year. Well, here’s one that got lost in the Star Wars shuffle that you’ll want to know, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.
Friedkin’s previous work included The French Connection and The Exorcist, and he envisioned this as his greatest undertaking. The movie is an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel Le Salaire de la peur, which had previously been filmed in 1953 as The Wages of Fear. In the story four men on the run end up in a small Latin American town and need to drive a pair of trucks containing highly unstable explosives more than 200 miles to an oil well that has been blown up by local terrorists.
Roy Scheider plays an Irish mobster and is perhaps the only recognizable name in the film. It’s the trucks however that are the big stars, beat to hell and way past their sell-by dates the two GMC M-series beasts tackle seemingly insurmountable odds – including the crossing of a rain-swollen river on a tree trunk bridge that’s one of the most edge of your seat stunts ever attempted. There’s plenty of cool cars playing supporting rolls too, including a Porsche 911 Targa that’s going to need an expensive window replacement, and a Plymouth Fury that gets pretty furious.
Sorcerer debuted to critical pans and little interest from the movie-going public who were perhaps too caught up in the Star Wars frenzy to care. Time has been kind to Friedkin’s film however and it’s today considered to be a masterpiece. I can’t say if that’s an accurate portrayal, only that it’s one of my all-time favorite movies. Check out the trailer after the jump and see if it might be one of yours as well.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/3BDbIzovuos[/youtube]
Of course, seeing as the trailer is so exciting and the film perhaps a forgotten classic, it’s not available to stream anywhere. Contractual disagreements withheld the movie from DVD and TV presentation for years, but those have all been worked out so you might find Sorcerer on disc at your local Library, or there’s Netflix if you’re still getting discs delivered to your door.
Image: YouTube
Hoonivercinema: Monday Movie Trailer
By Robert Emslie
Aug 24, 2015
Jeff Glucker
Interesting.
I’d seen it on cable TV 30+ years ago. I tried to find it again and only found a VHS dump on the t-rrents.
Me too. I saw it on cable back in the ’80s, and it’s still one of the most intense films I’ve ever seen. Lots of crazy stuff in that movie, starting with just the first minutes, even before the protagonists split for South America.
Make no mistake, The Wages of Fear is also a masterpiece – better than Sorcerer in my opinion. However, the latter movie has a more evil looking truck.
Like the rest of you, I saw this for the 1st time on HBO in the late 70’s and hadn’t seen it again until I bought the BluRay last year. That bridge scene still packs a wallop. Excellent film.
See the French original, for sure, but this is good, too.
By the way, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was on this morning. I think that was last week’s post. Been awhile since I saw it, pretty amusing.
“and I’ll bet you can’t name a movie other than Star Wars that debuted that year.”
Ha! You underestimate the Hooniverse.
http://randall-reilly-cms-blogs.dir.s3.amazonaws.com/117/files/2014/12/bandit-2.jpg
You could even narrow it down to science fiction films…
See now I was thinking that this came out in ’78, a year later.
And I thought that this came out in ’76!
“Smokey and the Bandit is a 1977 American action comedy film starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Reed, Pat McCormick, Paul Williams and Mike Henry.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_and_the_Bandit
You can’t argue with the Encyclopedia of Wikis… Oh, wait…