Aug
22
Sorcerer (1977, USA, William Friedkin) AKA Wages of Sin
Hot on the heels of some of the biggest grossing pictures of the first half of the 1970s it seemed William Friedkin could do no wrong. How appropriate, then, that a director so enamoured with fatalism, so besotted with the cynicism of the age, would fall so quickly from grace, his vertiginous decline signalled by the rather colossal failure of his follow-up to The Exorcist, the action-thriller Sorcerer. A remake of the Henri-Georges Clouzot classic Wages of Fear, Sorcerer was made for what was at the time a massive budget of $21m, but returned a meagre $9m domestic after its initial theatrical run.
Hot on the heels of some of the biggest grossing pictures of the first half of the 1970s it seemed William Friedkin could do no wrong. How appropriate, then, that a director so enamoured with fatalism, so besotted with the cynicism of the age, would fall so quickly from grace, his vertiginous decline signalled by the rather colossal failure of his follow-up to The Exorcist, the action-thriller Sorcerer. A remake of the Henri-Georges Clouzot classic Wages of Fear, Sorcerer was made for what was at the time a massive budget of $21m, but returned a meagre $9m domestic after its initial theatrical run.
