'SORCERER'..........BYE, BYE, 70'S CINEMA.........

Sorcerer (1977)   Two big movies went into the marketplace in the summer of 1977........

              George Lucas's swashbuckling, crowd-rousing sci-fi fantasy "Star Wars"......and William Friedkin's grim, gritty "Sorcerer", an ambitious remake of the French classic "The Wages Of Fear", concerning lost souls who end up driving trucks loaded with unstable dynamite.....

               Guess which one of them audiences stayed away from in vast numbers......

                You couldn't ask for a more telling metaphor of one era of cinema heading for the exits, while another one, the era of the feel-good blockbuster, trumpeting its grand arrival.......

                Friedkin's film, a grueling, heart-of-darkness marathon similar in many ways to Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", was an uncompromising director-driven trip into nihilistic hell that had no interest in generating claps and cheers from an audience.

                Moviegoers, floating on galactic helium from repeat viewings of "Star Wars", wanted nothing more to do with any further iconoclastic, downbeat visions from 70's auteurs......

               And "Sorcerer" was the honest-to-God, real down 'n dirty deal......with a quartet of unsavory, unsympathetic criminals (Roy Scheider among them) hiding out from their various consequences in an unnamed Latin American hellhole. For cash and passports back to more civilized refuges, they agree to drive two trucks to an oil well fire.........which the company hopes to put out using the trucks' cargo of temperamental TNT that leaks nitro-glycerin.

                This mission, as they say......does not bode well for anybody.

                 For any viewer willing to stick with it.......what a visual feast awaited. Friedkin filled the film with with stunning imagery and bravura moments......including the mind-boggling, "how-the-hell-did-they-do-that?" sequence of the trucks gingerly making their way across a ramshackle, rapidly crumbling and swaying suspension bridge - in the middle of monsoon, no less.

                But the l977 summer movie crowd wouldn't go near it........not when they could happily munch popcorn through "Star Wars", "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Smokey and The Bandit."

                The bells were tolling for directors of tough, in-your-face cinema like Freidkin.

                 The rough-edged, deliberately quirky, depressive  films of the 70's directors were coming to an end.......(you could point to Michael Cimino's  "Heaven's Gate" as the director-driven epic  that really slammed the final nail in the coffin......for both studios and ticket-buyers.

                 From this point on, fun ruled.........and provocative filmmaking would slowly fall into the hands of independent directors.....(and none of these guys would ever get their hands on the kind of  money and studio backing  it took to make something like  "Sorcerer", or "Apocalypse Now".....or "Heaven's Gate".

              It took time, but 41 years later, "Sorcerer" now enjoys a well-deserved reputation as a long lost but newly re-discovered classic.

               Couldn't happen to a rougher, tougher, better movie.  A 4 star case of dynamite (****) waiting to blow everybody away.......