Sorcerer

Friedkin's remake of Clouzot's 1953 thriller, The Wages of Fear, at a cost of more than twenty million dollars, bombed spectacularly in the States. Even cut by almost thirty minutes for British release, the film's narrative of four desperate men trucking nitroglycerin through 300 miles of South American jungle advances at far too slow a pace to aspire to the suspense value of the original. Friedkin hints at political themes, but the film suffers most from condescendingly over-emphatic direction, and a generally tedious, relentless grimy realism in the opening half hour. One simply wonders what, say, Peckinpah might have made of it.