William Friedkin's Sorcerer (1977)

After success with The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), William Friedkin coolly requested $15 million (over the $2.5 million offered) to film two trucks hauling dynamite across a South American jungle. Friedkin’s problem was that this pitch -- truck, dynamite, jungle -- provided his entire plot. Whereas The French Connection offered a gritty crime-thriller with epic car chases, and The Exorcist argued for Christian faith over scientific reasoning (with pea-soup projectiles to spare), Friedkin’s poorly titled Sorcerer (1977) explored little more than classic man-in-conflict scenarios. He eventually won (and exceeded) his budget for a project that failed to earn $6 million in box offices and panned in the press. Friedkin contends that Star Wars’ premiere a month prior overshadowed Sorcerer, making it the flop that nearly ended his career. However, Sorcerer recently garnered praise as an overlooked masterpiece. Surely, Friedkin captured viscerally intense naturalistic peril without relying on computer imagery or soundstage models. Also, the now famous film score by German krautrockers Tangerine Dream created a sensory-skewing contradiction between unsettling electronic sounds and visually devastated landscapes. Admittedly, the entire film feels intentionally and effectively off-kilter. And perhaps this explains Sorcerer’s flopped release: it portrays war without mandates. Unlike another film about spiritual chaos, Apocalypse Now, which critically succeeded two years later, Sorcerer roots its hell in a narration and terrain too unfamiliar for therapeutic viewing. And in 1977, post-Vietnam America may have preferred Star Wars’ victorious underdogs. Yet Sorcerer, unlike Star Wars, deals with a far more theoretical and less palatable victory: that of cowards seeking redemption. Four men exiled in a hellacious South American slum receive, in exchange for a new life, an offer to drive nitroglycerin soaked dynamite through 200 miles of thick jungle to an imploding oil well. The trek becomes as allegorical as Apocalypse Now -- traversing soul trenches toward bleak promises -- though not as star-studded or politically charged. But it is the very other-worldliness of Sorcerer that validates its newfound laurels. Lack of familiarity often intensifies inspection, potentially making a hazy mirror the most truly reflective. After all, at their core, most men can confess to moments of cowardice and self-sentenced exile. We remember, and often fear, sensory-skewing contradictions between our natural and spiritual identities. And we often fantasize about displaying grandiose ingenuity when tested. In such, experiencing Sorcerer’s Jacobian demand for blessed redemption is like listening to Psalms of lamentation in another tongue. Amen and Selah.