Classic Movie Review Sorcerer

Sorcerer (1977) 

Directed by William Friedkin 

Written by Walon Green

Starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, Amidou 

Release Date June 24th, 1977 

Published August 16th, 2023 

In our final tribute to famed director William Friedkin, myself and my co-hosts on the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast watched and talked about Friedkin's much maligned and recently reconsidered 1977 thriller Sorcerer. When it was released, Sorcerer was written off by many critics and it was considered a failure for not reaching the box office heights of Friedkin's twin classics The Exorcist and The French Connection, a standard that was desperately unfair to this far more challenging movie. 

Sorcerer was a remake of The Wages of Fear, a challenging, cynical, and deeply uncommercial French movie that was based on an equally bleak and unrelenting book. Sorcerer thus was never designed as a typical blockbuster with the kind of wide appeal that creates box office success. It's a tribute to Friedkin's dedication as an artist and his hubris as a businessman that he would try use his clout to make a deeply uncommercial movie into a success. It didn't work, but he did make one hell of a great movie. 

But don't ask my why it was called Sorcerer, that title is complete nonsense. The story of Sorcerer introduces us to four desperate men fleeing from what is likely an early death. Each has a criminal background that was a recipe for dying before their time. Wanting to prolong their miserable lives, each man escapes to South America where work is scarce and survival is a struggle. There are few jobs and the one potentially well paying gig is so ludicrously dangerous it may not be worth doing. 

Oil companies are destroying the natural beauty of the South American jungles. When one of their oil rigs catches fire the only way to stop it is to blow it up. For that, they need nitroglycerin, a volatile explosive, one that is deeply unstable. The slightest jostling could set off the explosive and destroy anyone in the vicinity of it. Nevertheless, the oil company is offering good money to transport nitroglycerin via truck over the uneven ground of the jungle to their oil well fire. They need four men for the job and, of course, the four desperate men we've met before are the men for the job. 

With nothing to lose, these four lost souls must rebuild trucks that are capable of running smoothly enough not to set off the nitroglycerin while sturdy enough to make it over the mountainous jungle terrain where paved roads are a non-existent luxury and dirt paths are often covered over by landslides due to the rainy season. It's a fool's errand that only men at the very end of their tether would attempt to take on. That's the backdrop of Sorcerer that sets us on a path of intense, grim, nasty scenes that you watch through your fingers as you gasp for every tension filled breath. 

Sorcerer is like Ice Road Truckers on steroids. If you've never seen that History Channel reality series, it follows truckers who carry supplies across the most perilous terrain in the world as they risk dropping their giant semi-trucks through ever more perilous and icy terrain. Sorcerer may not be on ice but the landscape of loose dirt and gravel feels just as perilous. Add to that the nitroglycerin in the back of the two trucks on this journey and you get the sense of the pressure cooker of suspense that is Sorcerer. Where the thought that a TV show can't necessarily film and share the death of its protagonists, removing a little of the suspense of Ice Road Truckers, a movie is not bound by this and it feels as if we could lose any one of our main characters in Sorcerer at any moment. 

One of the reasons that Sorcerer was a bad bet to be a big hit was Friedkin's decision to cast actors not familiar to American audiences. Aside from Roy Scheider, fresh off the success of The French Connection and Jaws, the cast is almost entirely unknown to American audiences. This was a calculated choice by Friedkin as because we don't know these actors, we can't assume which one might survive and which one might die. A movie star provides a comfort that they will be around for a while in a movie they are the star of. Hiring unknown actors however, creates doubt that has a big role to play in the breathtaking suspense of Sorcerer. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review The French Connection

The French Connection (1971) 

Directed by William Friedkin 

Written by Ernest Tidyman

Starring Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, Fernando Rey, Tony Lo Bianco 

Release Date October 7th, 1971 

Published August 11th 2023 

I don't get it. I don't get what anyone sees in The French Connection. I've tried. I've seen The French Connection a half dozen times. Each time I watch I try and see what so many others, including my idol, Roger Ebert sees in this beloved action movie. For the life of me, I just don't see it. The characters are thin, the action that is supposedly pulse-pounding feels plodding as I see it, and that car chase that has been raved about for more than 50 years is only impressive because it looks genuinely dangerous. I guess we're lucky no one was killed. That's supposed to be impressive. 

I do believe that the elements of The French Connection should work. William Friedkin is a very good director. I have recently written about his exceptional work much later in his career on a pair of outlandish but artful and exciting movies, The Hunted and Bug. I also have a great deal of love and respect for Gene Hackman. Hackman is one of the greats of 1970s cinemas, an icon who kept up his remarkable legacy of great work through to the end of his career via well-earned retirement just as Friedkin returned to the big screen. Roy Scheider, the cinematography, the dirty, grimy milieu, all add up to what should have been a really great movie. So why do I find The French Connection so mind numbingly dull? 

The French Connection tells the wide-ranging story of a drug deal. It begins in France where, presumably, an undercover cop is brutally gunned down. The opening scene of The French Connection lingers for ages as we watch the cop watch his targets, a French businessman named Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), and his henchman, Pierre (Marcel Bozzuffi). He follows them from one location to another, and then goes for a walk and buys a baguette and appears to be calling it a day. He grabs his mail, and he gets shot in the face. 

Then we head to New York City where Detective Popeye Doyle is dressed as Santa Claus and talking to some kinds. Out of the corner of his eye, Doyle is watching a bar nearby where his partner, Cloudy (Roy Scheider) is undercover and waiting for a perp to make a move. When the perp does make a movie, a chase ensues. Eventually, in a back alley, after Cloudy gets stabbed in the hand, the perp is caught, and Doyle purposefully confounds the suspect by asking him if he 'Picked his toes in Poughkeepsie. Why? Who the hell knows. It never comes up exactly why Doyle does this. I had to google it to find out that it was a nonsense phrase intended to cause confusion during an interrogation. 

Toes aside, we then watch as Doyle and Cloudy get on the scent of a new player in the local drug business. Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) is a small-time shop owner who dreams of moving up in the drug racket. He's become connected to a top guy, a money man and Kingpin named Weinstock. Having made another connection with the aforementioned French guys, Sal has positioned himself to potentially pull off the biggest international heroin smuggling operation in history. Millions of dollars of the purest heroin on the market being brought into the country via a French movie star named Devereaux (Frederic de Pasquale). 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review Jaws 2

Jaws 2 (1978) 

Directed by Jeannot Szwarc 

Written by Carl Gottlieb, Howard Sackler

Starring Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Keith Gordon, Murray Hamilton 

Release Date June 16th, 1978

Published August 9th, 2023 

If there is ONE movie in the long history of movies that does not need a sequel, it's Jaws. Jaws, as crafted by Steven Spielberg, is a perfect movie. That doesn't mean it's the greatest movie of all time or even my favorite movie. When I say Jaws is a perfect movie, I merely stating that as the story is told and the film is executed, it's perfectly crafted in and of itself. Jaws, as it is, cannot be improved upon and requires no expansion upon its story. The characters, action, and ending, all play out in the best possible fashion for this movie. Jaws, as it plays, doesn't need to be expanded upon nor does it lend itself to being expanded upon. 

Thus, the only reason anyone would be ridiculous enough to make a sequel to Jaws is money. It's a purely mercenary effort to separate audiences from their money. There can be no art, no pure joy of creation to this endeavor, it's only about using something powerful as a brickbat with which to beat money out of audiences. Jaws is a money pinata and greedy Hollywood executives wanted their candy by any means necessary. That means that if they needed to force actor Roy Scheider to star in the sequel by holding him hostage to his contract, they would do it. And they did do that, Scheider didn't want to be in this movie. 

If it meant backing up a brinks truck to try and get Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss back, they would do it. It's a sign of great integrity that both Spielberg and Dreyfuss refused big money deals to compromise their integrity. Studio executives likely tried to drag up the corpse of Robert Shaw's Quint but thankfully stopped short of that. But would you be surprised that the idea was floated? It would not surprise me if that happened. Anything remotely familiar was going to be exploited for the chance of wacking that Jaws pinata. For instance, one person who did compromise his integrity is composer John Williams who did return and provided one of his most forgettable pieces of work for Jaws 2. 

So, why am I ranting about Jaws 2? The movie isn't exactly timely or relevant. Well, Jaws 2 was the classic on our latest episode of the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast. We paired Jaws 2 with The Meg 2: The Trench and what we found is that both of these movies stink out loud. Both The Meg 2 and Jaws 2 are miserable, overlong slogs that fail to remotely capture what made the first film something worth watching. The Meg, of course, doesn't compare with the genius of Jaws, it's merely the first of two Meg movies. But, The Meg is certainly better than its sequel and that's where the sequel relates to Jaws 2, which is a vastly inferior film to its original. 

Read my full length review at Horror.Media