Sorcerer (film) - Legacy

Legacy

Sorcerer was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound (Robert Knudson, Robert Glass, Richard Tyler and Jean-Louis Ducarme). Film critic Roger Ebert listed it at #9 on his ten-best films list of 1977.

The film today is more positively received by professional film critics; Rotten Tomatoes gives Sorcerer 71% fresh on its Tomatometer.

On August 21, 2009, author Stephen King posted an EW.com article entitled "Stephen King's Reliable Rentals." In his list of "20 that never disappoint," King placed the original Wages of Fear at #2 and Friedkin's Sorcerer at #1, writing,

Desperate men with nothing to lose set out in a truck convoy through the South American jungle. Their cargo is rotting dynamite sweating nitro, stuff so unstable the least bump may set it off. The original, Wages of Fear, is considered one of the greatest movies of the modern age, but I have a sneaking preference for Sorcerer, William Friedkin's remake. Roy Scheider had two great roles: Chief Brody in Jaws and Jackie Scanlon in Sorcerer. These films generate suspense through beautiful simplicity.

On 16 March 2001, writer/filmmaker Peter Hanson wrote on his blog,

Whereas many self-indulgent films by ’70s auteurs have been injured by time, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer has actually seen its critical stock rise in the intervening decades... Seen now, the picture is a crazily intense thrill ride that matches the inherent tension of the plot with a probing descent into the psyche of an archetypal character driven insane by circumstance... Sorcerer contains one of the most elaborately filmed suspense sequences in cinema history: The precarious crossing of a hand-made bridge across a jungle river in the middle of a horrific rainstorm. Using a staggering number of camera angles, Friedkin drags the scene out to create an excruciating level of tension, and that cinematic commitment carries through to nearly the entire film.