Sorcerer 1977 trailer HD remaster

We saw this movie at the Hollywood Theater last night. A man with a microphone gave us a little history of the director William Friedkin. Friedkin is the same director who gave us The French Connection and The Exorcist. Sorcerer was a bit of a flop, in part due to it's coming out at the same time as Star Wars.

Sorcerer is based on the same novel as the 1953 movie Wages of Fear. In both movies, the essential part of the plot is the same:

The film centers on a group of four down-their-luck European men who are hired by an American oil company to drive two trucks over mountain dirt roads, loaded with nitroglycerine needed to extinguish an oil well fire.

The name Sorcerer comes from one of the dilapidated trucks they are using to transport the explosive, in this movie the explosive is old 'sweating' dynamite that is unstable.

There is very little dialog and most of it is unintelligible, I never developed any empathy for any of the characters. 

The film is almost entirely action. There are two parts to the movie. In first part we get four short stories about how the four men got into the trouble that forced them to flee to this jungle hamlet. The well dressed man shoots a man in a room at a hotel with a gun equipped with a silencer. The curly haired guy is a freedom fighter/terrorist whose group has been found out. The Frenchman had been engaged in some shady business deals and if he can't come up with a large sum of cash to make things right, he's going to jail. Roy Scheider and three other thugs rob a Catholic church in New Jersey where they are consolidating the donations from several churches. Roy crashes their get-away car in spectacular fashion. He manages to crawl away and get on a ship headed for parts unknown.

These four end up in a shanty town in the jungle that exists only because an American company is drilling for oil and they need workers to build the pipeline and operate the drilling rig. Then we have the explosion and fire at the drilling rig. If they can't put out the fire and get the rig back into production, the whole project is going to get canceled, so they are desperate for a way to put out the fire. Then someone turns up this old stash of dynamite sitting and rotting in an old shed. Problem is, the shed is 200 miles from the fire. They consider flying it with helicopter, but they suspect the vibrations would set off the explosive. No sense risking an expensive helicopter when we have a bunch of old, junk trucks and a bunch of desperate men willing to drive them.

One highlight is the scene where a truck is crossing a gorge on a very rickety wooden bridge that is collapsing out from under them. Another is where they have to cross a river on a very sketchy suspension bridge in driving rainstorm. Then there's the scene where they rig up a booby trap to blow up giant tree trunk that has fallen across the road.

Three of the four men die during the trip. Roy survives long enough to collect the promised loot, but instead of leaving he stops to dance with the washer woman. And who should show up? The imported hit man sent by the guys in New Jersey.