Rise, SORCERER! The lost masterpiece of 1977 comes to blu-ray.

It's been a long time on its jungle creep but William Friedkin's much anticipated blu-ray SORCERER (1977) has emerged into the clearing and into the flaming oil fire of our American hypocrisy. Distance, time, and the the totality of Friedkin's stunning attention to vivid, lived-in widescreen detail are now revealed in staggeringly beautiful shots: the monstrous grins of the trucks moving through the mist like Travis Bickels through a Kubrick rainstorm; flooding rivers lifting flimsy bridges up off their moorings; crowded Tel Aviv streets rocking from a bomb and the quick soldier reprisal; an assortment of hard-looking Catholic priests counting money in the backroom of a church during a wedding; a white collar Frenchman ducking out on his wife as a swanky Parisian cafe to avoid prison for embezzlement --each character gets their origin exposition, their reason for escaping to the anonymity and weak extradition practices of some nameless South or Central American one-horse town, and each origin packs enough real  hustle and bustle for a film of their own (such as Friedkin's surreal Egyptology opener in EXORCIST); when they wind up in the surreal and savage beauty of some unnamed Central American jungle one horse town depending on nearby oil pipe for survival, the jungle adventure comprising the bulk of the film, and being the kind of thing Warner Herzog seems to go for in his own work but sometimes errs on the side of decency; he perhaps lqacks the insane drive and egotistic bullying needed to smash the world apart in order to capture its plummy essence, which is why he needed Kinski, or a Cage. Friedkin, however, is his own Kinski. We all know the horror anecdotes of the film's troubled shoot, with Friedkin harassing the locals and crew in the paranoid, foamy-at-the-mouth way of the coke head rich Anglo filmmaker from the 70s, but my friend. It was worth it.

What's most interesting is the contrast between the hostile nature of these male characters and the deeply human story (which I mean as the opposite of Fordian sentimentality - human as in 'true' human, bestial, full of long-standing grudges, fears, greed and guts - and sometimes fear, greed and guts is enough). Taking a page from Peckinpah, these men are dangerous lowdown scoundrels who are, in a sense, the only characters tough enough to handle an almost suicidal task - hauling very unstable explosives through 200 miles of rough dirt roads and jungles in the middle of Bolivia, Ecuador or some such remote rain forest outpost.

There are almost no women in the story - the one who gets actual billing in the cast is Anne Marie-Deschodt as the Frenchman's rich wife. As an ironic commentary to Clouzot's original, an elderly barkeep who never speaks but who earns a soft spot in the mens' hearts, like an unofficial den mother (contrasted by Clouzot's firey temptress played by Clouszot's then-wife Véra). It works because this is a movie that is not about desire, but survival. No time for soft stuff.  It's like THE THING or THE GREY. This is not a movie for flowers and song, it's about struggling through the mud, man. It's about the kind of men who are, as we learn in Hollywood, the nasty necessity of the western world. I like it way better than Clouzot's original because the jungle is realer. Clouzot has no interest in capturing the vivid textures of nature, of wheels and dashboards and the rumbling of trucks full of soldiers sent in to quell a riot.

The Tangerine Dream SORCERER score has been some of my favorite soundtrack for awhile and in the blu-ray mix it pulses and throbs like if John Carpenter and Klaus Schulze got together for the score of THERE WILL BE BLOOD, like the best synth scores of the era it never micro-manages our emotional state, the way, say, John Williams or Howard Shore do with their flourishing orchestras, rather the pulsating amniotic eerie music just sets the chilly, nerve-shredding tone and as such is ahead of its time, at least for Hollywood. Don't forget Carpenter's groundbreaking HALLOWEEN score was a year or so away. As far as great scores in America we only knew Ennio Morricone through the handful of films that wound up on TV or the drive-in. The movie scores we kids talked about on the playground (excluding those of GREASE and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER) were strictly micro-managerial and orchestral - Nino Rota's melancholic GODFATHER, and above all the pompous thunder majesty of John Williams' scores for JAWS (sure he has the famous shark approach music but he also sticks in pirate jauntiness that deflates all the suspense when the Orca sets out to sea) and STAR WARS (much of it ripped from Holst the way JAWS was ripped from Stravinsky). Tangerine Dream's SORCERER score by contrast never tells us what to feel, it just gives us a way to feel it, a way to mystically transfer this rainy wet misery we see onscreen into an atmospheric alien buzz.

I remember this film when it came out in 1977, being intrigued by the title of this film when it came out around the same time as STAR WARS, thinking it might involve wizards and armies of the dead and so forth - and instead, what, trucks? Good lord, that's false advertising! But now that ignition is thrown in reverse. Victory is thine, you crazy coked-up sonofabitch! So drive!