Post by london777 on Aug 31, 2017 14:52:07 GMT
This is not a review, just some random thoughts. Hopefully it will prompt someone more knowledgeable to post something more coherent and insightful.
Having recently been impressed with William Friedkin's Killer Joe (2011), I dug out the DVD of Sorcerer (1977) which was in a stack awaiting donation to the local charity shop.
There is an old cliche in soccer "a game of two halves". Boy, was this ever a film of two halves! On Tuesday evening I watched it until the midpoint, when the guys were rebuilding the trucks before departure. I was bored and falling asleep so switched off. I remembered why I had discarded the film. Next evening I only had an hour to spare before going out so I thought I would finish the movie. Starting those truck engines did more than bring the vehicles alive. The second half was a different movie altogether and well worth watching, though not without blemishes.
On IMDb it says two contradictory things. Firstly that this was just a low budget "filler" job for Friedkin while he was putting together his next "personal project". But then that he considered Francis Ford Coppola his rival and was trying to emulate and surpass "Apocalypse Now" which was already in production (which could hardly be attempted on a limited budget). I suppose his intentions could have changed.
Scheider and the other leads (bar Amidou, who had little to do) were not his first choices. In some cases they were late picks out of desperation. And, frankly, that is how it looks. The human actors are pretty uninvolving. It is only when the trucks enter the movie that the film really takes off. They are the real stars.
The "face" of Scheider's truck replicates the face of the "sorcerer" idol which features in the titles and elsewhere, though, oddly, the truck named "Sorcerer" in the film is the other one. Surely that was a continuity error and they had to switch trucks for some reason during production? The other truck with its hood covered in those strange ventilators, looks like a dinosaur. Were they actual production trucks or something created for the film? There is one scene where a truck is revved up to max and thrashing about with smoke apparently blowing out of its ears. It really looks angry and malevolent. I wonder if Friedkin was influenced by Duel (1971)?
I had not remembered the anti-neo-colonial "political message" in the movie, but it was very clear this time. Better done than the crude and naive stuff in Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986), for example, but the problem is that it is just one section of the film which could have been omitted without affecting the flow too much. It is not integral to the story.
The sound got an Oscar nomination and is very good. Tangerine Dream wrote the score without reference to the screenplay so it is a bit hit and miss, but seems to work.
I had not noticed that it was contemporaneous with Apocalypse Now while watching, but it certainly reminded me of that movie. Its troubled production history and budget overshoot is a scaled-down replica of the FFC effort. From personal experience I can say that anyone who launches a project in the Dominican Republic is asking to be let down and ripped off big time. Another movie I thought of was Fitzcarraldo (1982). The technical ingenuity in getting the trucks and the boat through their respective jungles were depicted in similar ways, and both were insane, desperate endeavours.
I have never seen the European version. It is shorter though it does contain some extra scenes. It has a different, more conventional, score. The main difference is that it removes the four prologues showing why the main characters had to flee to this hellish banana republic and intersperses some of that material throughout the film as flashbacks. Apparently this was not done well, but I do agree with removing the prologues. They do nothing except show us that the quartet are all vile bastards and not to be sympathised with, and this could have been achieved otherwise (maybe with flashbacks, but better done). You know the frustration when you get into a movie then your DVD goes bad. This is like that four times within 30 minutes. The fact that the four stories are all pretty banal so you do not really care that they are interrupted is not much compensation.
*** MAJOR SPOILER***
I will close with an easy quiz question. In the final scene, Scheider delays his plane out of Hell for "five minutes" so he can dance with the (rather unattractive) charlady. It symbolises his return to humanity and does it well. But those five minutes will cost him his life as he will now fail to evade the hitmen on his trail. To what (much greater) movie is this an "homage"?
Having recently been impressed with William Friedkin's Killer Joe (2011), I dug out the DVD of Sorcerer (1977) which was in a stack awaiting donation to the local charity shop.
There is an old cliche in soccer "a game of two halves". Boy, was this ever a film of two halves! On Tuesday evening I watched it until the midpoint, when the guys were rebuilding the trucks before departure. I was bored and falling asleep so switched off. I remembered why I had discarded the film. Next evening I only had an hour to spare before going out so I thought I would finish the movie. Starting those truck engines did more than bring the vehicles alive. The second half was a different movie altogether and well worth watching, though not without blemishes.
On IMDb it says two contradictory things. Firstly that this was just a low budget "filler" job for Friedkin while he was putting together his next "personal project". But then that he considered Francis Ford Coppola his rival and was trying to emulate and surpass "Apocalypse Now" which was already in production (which could hardly be attempted on a limited budget). I suppose his intentions could have changed.
Scheider and the other leads (bar Amidou, who had little to do) were not his first choices. In some cases they were late picks out of desperation. And, frankly, that is how it looks. The human actors are pretty uninvolving. It is only when the trucks enter the movie that the film really takes off. They are the real stars.
The "face" of Scheider's truck replicates the face of the "sorcerer" idol which features in the titles and elsewhere, though, oddly, the truck named "Sorcerer" in the film is the other one. Surely that was a continuity error and they had to switch trucks for some reason during production? The other truck with its hood covered in those strange ventilators, looks like a dinosaur. Were they actual production trucks or something created for the film? There is one scene where a truck is revved up to max and thrashing about with smoke apparently blowing out of its ears. It really looks angry and malevolent. I wonder if Friedkin was influenced by Duel (1971)?
I had not remembered the anti-neo-colonial "political message" in the movie, but it was very clear this time. Better done than the crude and naive stuff in Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986), for example, but the problem is that it is just one section of the film which could have been omitted without affecting the flow too much. It is not integral to the story.
The sound got an Oscar nomination and is very good. Tangerine Dream wrote the score without reference to the screenplay so it is a bit hit and miss, but seems to work.
I had not noticed that it was contemporaneous with Apocalypse Now while watching, but it certainly reminded me of that movie. Its troubled production history and budget overshoot is a scaled-down replica of the FFC effort. From personal experience I can say that anyone who launches a project in the Dominican Republic is asking to be let down and ripped off big time. Another movie I thought of was Fitzcarraldo (1982). The technical ingenuity in getting the trucks and the boat through their respective jungles were depicted in similar ways, and both were insane, desperate endeavours.
I have never seen the European version. It is shorter though it does contain some extra scenes. It has a different, more conventional, score. The main difference is that it removes the four prologues showing why the main characters had to flee to this hellish banana republic and intersperses some of that material throughout the film as flashbacks. Apparently this was not done well, but I do agree with removing the prologues. They do nothing except show us that the quartet are all vile bastards and not to be sympathised with, and this could have been achieved otherwise (maybe with flashbacks, but better done). You know the frustration when you get into a movie then your DVD goes bad. This is like that four times within 30 minutes. The fact that the four stories are all pretty banal so you do not really care that they are interrupted is not much compensation.
*** MAJOR SPOILER***
I will close with an easy quiz question. In the final scene, Scheider delays his plane out of Hell for "five minutes" so he can dance with the (rather unattractive) charlady. It symbolises his return to humanity and does it well. But those five minutes will cost him his life as he will now fail to evade the hitmen on his trail. To what (much greater) movie is this an "homage"?