For thirty years I have heard what an unknown classic Sorcerer is, so when the Triplex showed it last night, I had to finally check it off my list. All I knew was it's about four desperate men who transport trucks of nitroglycerin through a jungle. Wow did this movie pay off, it was even better than I hoped for.
Four strangers, from four corners of the world, each flee to South America and end up cornered in a miserable peasant mudhole village, working grunt jobs for an American oil company. Desperate for escape, they sign on to this 200 mile suicide mission.
I must be tired of what passes for action/thrillers in the 21st century, because this 1977 classic was like a shot of adrenaline. Actually shot in the jungle, with real rain, real mud, real explosions? The verisimilitude was intoxicating. You could smell the malaria and dysentery of the cast and crew on every frame.
William Friedkin is a master movie storyteller. I don't like The Exorcist, but The French Connection is a masterpiece. Much like The French Connection, Friedkin appreciates long, wordless scenes. More show, less tell. I can remember three scenes in a two-hour movie where one character explains plot devices to another.
I also love his unhurried pace. The two-hour movie spends nearly 45 minutes placing our four protagonists on the chessboard. The men don't begin their journey across the jungle until halfway through. The fact that the movie feels unhurried and ends in 121 minutes is a testament to Friedkin's professionalism. A movie like this could easily have bloated another half hour.
Friedkin does a fine job of avoiding telegraphing moments, all the plot machinations feel honest, and he nearly stuck the landing too - I wish the ending was slightly more ambiguous, but I had already decided how it was going to end before it was over anyway...
Unlike nearly every other movie that mostly takes place in the front of a moving vehicle, the four men barely share anything about themselves as they travel. Some might think that we'd feel more for them if we knew more about their lives, but this movie is too ruthless for that.
Stephen King has called this his all-time favorite movie, and that tracks for me - it reminds me of his novel The Long Walk - these four men are on a trip where stopping or giving up would mean almost-certain death, a trip through the jungle wilderness where there is zero hope for rescue, a trip where the only hope for survival, and maybe escape from this mudhole, is to finish the journey, but also a trip where their cargo can kill them at any moment. A journey with stakes like this also means they can only trust each other as far as their survival depends on it.
(at the Triplex, with several men who looked too much like Comic Book Guy for my taste. Guys who walked into the theater with a fried chicken bites, Classic Cokes, and popcorn too. yikes!)