Sorcerer

Sorcerer is a 1977 American action-thriller film produced and directed by William Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, and Amidou. The second adaptation of Georges Arnaud's 1950 French novel Le Salaire de la peur, it is often considered a remake of the 1953 film The Wages of Fear, although Friedkin disagreed with this assessment. The film depicts four outcasts from varied backgrounds living in a Central American village assigned to transport two trucks loaded with aged, poorly kept dynamite that is "sweating" its dangerous basic ingredient, nitroglycerin. Sorcerer was originally conceived as a small-scale side project to Friedkin's next major film, The Devil's Triangle, with a modest US$2.5 million budget. The director later opted for a more ambitious production, which he envisioned as his magnum opus. The cost of Sorcerer was earmarked at $15 million, escalating to $22 million following a grueling production with various filming locations—primarily in the Dominican Republic—and conflicts between Friedkin and his crew. The mounting expenses later required the involvement of two major film studios, Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, with both studios sharing the U.S. distribution and Cinema International Corporation being responsible for the international release. The film received generally negative reviews upon its initial release and became a box office bomb; its domestic (including rentals) and worldwide gross of $5.9 million and $9 million respectively did not recoup its costs. Many critics as well as Friedkin himself attributed the film's commercial failure to its release at roughly the same time as Star Wars, which instantly became a pop-culture phenomenon. However, the film has enjoyed a significant critical reappraisal in the decades following, with some critics lauding it as an overlooked masterpiece, and "perhaps the last undeclared [one] of the American '70s". Friedkin considered Sorcerer among his favorite works, and the most personal and difficult film he ever made. Tangerine Dream's electronic music score was also acclaimed, leading the band to become popular soundtrack composers in the 1980s. After a lengthy lawsuit filed against Universal Studios and Paramount, Friedkin supervised a digital restoration of Sorcerer, with the new print premiering at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on August 29, 2013. Warner Home Video released the film remastered on Blu-ray on April 22, 2014.