Sorcerer is a 1977 American existential thriller film directed and produced by William Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, and Amidou. The second adaptation of Georges Arnaud's 1950 French novel Le Salaire de la peur, it has been widely considered a remake of the first adaptation, the 1953 film The Wages of Fear. Friedkin has disagreed with this notion. The plot depicts four outcasts from varied backgrounds meeting in a South American village, where they are assigned to transport cargoes of nitroglycerin.
Sorcerer was originally conceived as a side-project to Friedkin's next major film, The Devil's Triangle, with a modest US$2.5 million budget. The director later opted for a bigger production, which he thought would become his legacy. The cost of Sorcerer was earmarked at $15 million, escalating to $22 million following a troubled production with various filming locations—primarily in the Dominican Republic—and conflicts between Friedkin and his crew. The mounting expenses required the involvement of two major film studios, Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, with the former handling the U.S. distribution and the latter being responsible for the international release.
The film gained mixed to negative critical reception upon its release. Its domestic (including rentals) and worldwide gross of $5.9 million and $9 million respectively did not recoup its costs. A considerable number of critics, as well as the director himself, attributed the film's commercial failure to its release at roughly the same time as Star Wars, which instantly became a pop-culture phenomenon. Some observers consider the success of Star Wars and the box-office failure of Sorcerer to be a starting point in the decline of the New Hollywood cinema movement and the beginning of the blockbuster era.
The film has enjoyed a critical re-evaluation, and some critics have lauded it as an overlooked masterpiece, perhaps "the last undeclared [one] of the American '70s". Director Friedkin considers Sorcerer the favorite of his works, and the most personal and difficult film he has made. Tangerine Dream's electronic music score was also acclaimed, leading the band to become popular soundtrack composers in the 1980s. After a lengthy lawsuit filed against Universal Studios and Paramount, Friedkin started supervising a digital restoration of Sorcerer, with the new print premiered at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on August 29, 2013. Its remastered home video release on Blu-ray came out on April 22, 2014.
