Film Review: Sorcerer (1977)

According to popular legend (or possibly revisionist history) the box office failure of William Friedkin's Sorcerer can be blamed on Star Wars, which opened at roughly the same time and sucked, as it were, all the commercial and critical air out of the room. I saw Sorcerer when it first came out and didn't think much of it, and now, nearly forty years later, I saw it again on DVD and had my original opinion confirmed: this is a poor film. I didn't like Star Wars very much, but it turns out that it was the better film.

The belated critical recognition that Sorcerer has received seems to be more about nostalgia for that brief period in the 1970s when American cinema, led by directors such as Friedkin, Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich, seemed to be on the verge of a golden age of auteur filmmaking. Heavily marketed, big budget, populist films like Star Wars and Jaws ended up setting the template for Hollywood in the decades to come, and for a lot of film critics and fans that represents the death of artistic American cinema. Be that as it may, nostalgia shouldn't blind any one to the fact that Sorcerer is a bloated, incoherent, and unnecessary remake of the brilliant The Wages of Fear (1953) by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

In case you haven't seen either film: four men, all from different parts of the world, are on the run from the law (with one exception) and have ended up in a hellish Central American town where the only employment is with an oil company. In order to get enough money to escape from the town the four agree to drive a load of nitroglycerine in two trucks to an oil well site that's burning out of control.  Sorcerer stumbles right from the start by giving us four vignettes to introduce the four desperate men. The original film began in the town and we learned their back stories as the story progressed through their interactions with each other. Friedkin takes the more obvious approach by showing the various crimes that caused these men to flee their homelands. So we get sequences set in Jerusalem, New Jersey, Paris and Vera Cruz. This lengthy introductory portion of the film doesn't tell us anything we couldn't have learned from the men themselves in the town; it all feels like an excuse to mount action scenes in various international locations. A terrorist bombing in Jerusalem shows some visual flair, but the New Jersey intro involving Roy Scheider's character is clumsily choreographed. The Paris sequence is dull and overlong, and the Vera Cruz episode turns out to be confusing because the character it introduces, Nilo, is given no reason to go on the run. We have no idea why he turns up in the town or why he volunteers to drive one of the trucks.

Another problem with the introductory vignettes is that once the men get to the town, no character development takes place. Friedkin seems to think the vignettes did all that work, so that means the final two-thirds of the film is virtually dialogue-free, at least when it comes to our four leads. This kills almost all the tension in the film because we aren't invested in these characters in any way. They're ciphers. Scenes that might otherwise be nail-biting become inert because it's hard to care if these anonymous characters live or die.

Some of the Central American locations are visually arresting, and a sequence involving the trucks crossing a rope bridge is impressive, but on the whole Sorcerer doesn't hold a candle to the original. The Wages of Fear, despite its vastly lower budget, is far more inventive both visually and in terms of storytelling. Sorcerer puts its big budget up on the screen, but it feels like the work of a B-movie director who doesn't quite know what to do with all that money.

Film Review: The Seven-Ups (1973)

Philip D'Antoni isn't a name you hear mentioned often when the history of modern cinema is discussed, but he certainly deserves some credit for two notable contributions to film history. The first is the car chase. D'Antoni was the producer of Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups. Now there were certainly car chases before Bullitt, but they were usually done for comic effect as in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, or they were clumsily filmed scenes (lots of rear projection shots) of squad cars chasing bank robbers. In Bullitt and The French Connection the car chase became an action centrepiece, the equivalent of the cavalry charge in westerns and historical epics. D'Antoni's "modern" car chases looked and sounded real, and created a new kind of cinematic excitement. After The French Connection virtually no action film was complete unlesss it included one or more elaborately staged car chases.

D'Antoni's other addition to film history is the creation of a sub-genre I'd call cop noir. Cop noir begins with The French Connection. If film noir was all about doomed lovers, laconic private detectives, and moody cinematography, cop noir was about documenting the decline and fall of American cities and the institutions that make them function as seen through cop eyes. Cop noir looks raw, sounds raw, and shows big American cities torn apart by street crime, organized crime, drug addiction, poverty, and corruption. Hard on the heels of The French Connection came Dirty Harry, Across 110th Street, Busting, Serpico, The Taking of Pelham 123, Badge 373, and a score of similar films. Bullitt isn't cop noir if only because Steve McQueen looks great, acts cool, mostly keeps his temper, and has a supermodel girlfriend before there were supermodels. Compare and contrast with Gene Hackman in The French Connection and you'll see what I mean.

And that brings us to The Seven-Ups. The story has a pre-Jaws Roy Scheider leading a small team of N.Y.C. cops who go after villains wanted for crimes that earn sentences of seven years and up. Why seven years? Because it makes for a punny movie title. The film's title is a dud, but the film isn't. The Seven-Ups is essentially a sequel to Connection in everything but name. It has the same gritty look, Don Ellis scored both films, and it features possibly the best car chase of the three films D'Antoni produced.

The plot has Scheider's team investigating why some of the city's crime bosses are being kidnapped. It turns out Scheider's main snitch, played by Tony Lo Bianco, is using information he gets from an unwitting Scheider to target wealthy criminals for kidnapping and ransom. Things are further complicated by the fact that snitch and cop are childhood friends.Things don't end well for one of them. The story is original and engaging, and might have been even better if D'Antoni hadn't decided to direct this film himself. He had no experience at directing and it shows on occasion. A couple of sequences, notably a scene in a car wash, are clumsily handled and feature a variety of glaring continuity errors.

D'Antoni does redeem himself with the action sequences, which are quick, dirty and efficient, and the car chase, which is certainly as good as the one in Connection as well as being longer. D'Antoni the director also does a nice job with the actors, choosing an all-ugly cast of New York actors who bring a lot of verisimilitude to the film. And New York looks like, well, the New York you don't see in Woody Allen movies. This is Ratso Rizzo's N.Y.C.

If you like to remember New York as being mad, bad and dangerous to visit, check out The Seven-Ups. Spoiler alert: the trailer below shows way too much of the film's highlights.