Sorcerer (1977)

	Directed by: William Friedkin	COUNTRY USA GENRE Action/Thriller NORWEGIAN TITLE Fryktens lønn RUNNING TIME 121 minutes
	Produced by: William Friedkin
	Written by (based on the novel The Wages of Fear by Georges Arnaud): Walon Green

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Jackie Scanlon / "Domínguez"	Roy Scheider
Victor Manzon / "Serrano"	Bruno Cremer	½
Nilo	Francisco Rabal	½
Kassem / "Martínez"	Amidou	½
Corlette	Ramon Bieri	½
Lartigue	Peter Capell	-
"Márquez"	Karl John	-
"Carlos"	Fredrick Ledebur	-
Spider	Joe Spinell	-

Review

William Friedkin's Sorcerer is a remarkably directed motion picture. Fortified by the successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist, the filmmaker went on location around the world, from Israel to the Dominican Republic, and captured naturalistic, sometimes newsreel-style footage of his cast of trained and untrained actors and real people with a frightening authenticity, at times under visibly gruelling circumstances. This unprecedented achievement in location work and cinematography creates an unusually riveting backdrop for the telling of the film's story, which is about four disparate fugitives who are given the chance to escape their destitute, incognito lives in an unassuming South American village when they are offered a perilous but lucrative transportation job. As the journey progresses, Sorcerer delves deeper into an Apocalypse Now-like atmosphere of doom and destruction that gives the film an emblematic quality, despite the occasional whiff of more familiar genre sensibilities. The famous bridge scene cost several million dollars and took three months to shoot, a testament to the audacity and danger involved in creating high-level set pieces in the pre-CGI era. The realism is tangible to this day. The film brings you remarkably close to nature, machinery, and the elements in utterly organic fashion. The synthesizer-based score by Tangerine Dream may not be equally organic, but it adds an ethereal shroud to the story.