Sorcerer (1977)

Sorcerer arrives from 1977, a year when the phrase social consciousness still meant something a studio could market without convening a committee. William Friedkin's tale of four fugitives hauling sweating nitroglycerin through a South American jungle is many things: a study in fatalism, a production legend, a box office casualty. It is not a tract.

The cast is genuinely international, drawing from France, Spain, Morocco, Germany and the American character-actor pool, and this polyglot assembly suits a story about men from four nations hiding in the same impoverished village. Nobody in the film remarks on it. That is the whole of the film's representational ambition, and it is enough. The picture is relentlessly masculine, its few women (Victor's wife, a bar maid with a crucifix) drifting past the frame like weather. No thesis is advanced about any of this. Jackie's sleep-deprived hallucinations are a survival device, the collapsing oil well is a plot engine and not a parable about extraction, and the movie ends on a gunshot and a black screen instead of a lesson. Friedkin shows. He does not tell, and he certainly does not scold.

There is a mild anti-capitalist undercurrent, since the American oil company holds Porvenir by the throat and pays desperate men a pittance to die for its burning well. It never rises to argument. The cynicism is structural, baked into the poverty and the wages, not delivered from a pulpit. The result is a dirty, patient thriller that trusts its audience to draw conclusions unaided. A rare vintage. Almost no additives.