From assassinations and acts of terrorism to familial abandonment and a catastrophic hit-and-run, each of the men choose to escape their home countries and mundane existences in order to remain alive, which acts as an immediate repression of their personal guilt and trauma. Rather than establishing the film’s protagonists as upright citizens and bearers of conventional moral standards, Friedkin introduces the four central figures as crooks and criminals through an inventive and efficient prologue, allowing the characters’ shady external actions to foreground the psychological fallout they will face throughout the rest of the film. Even after decades of similar genre-centric takedowns of historical trauma, Sorcerer towers above its peers as both a cathartic sociocultural text from the late 1970s and an action thriller in opposition to the mainstream machismo of its contemporaries like Dirty Harry and the James Bondfilms. Although Apocalypse Now would transpose Heart of Darkness to Vietnam in an attempt to literalize the internal conflict of the era two years later, Sorcerer boldly retains its South American location to craft a more universal yet mysterious treatise on psychological deterioration, allowing space for elements of greed and self-sabotage to stand in for Watergate and other collective controversies from the decade. Following an unlikely team of four men attempting to transport a dangerous load of active nitroglycerin while living on the lam in South America, Sorcerer literalizes the collective and individual traumas of the Vietnam Era through the men’s brazen and oftentimes annihilative tendencies, exhibiting the layers of PTSD through a Hitchcockian thriller narrative. Released in the midst of the Star Wars boom in mid-1977, Sorcerer acted as William Friedkin’s gritty and loose reimagining of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s foundational action thriller The Wages of Fear.
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