Now and again, I can draw parallels between movies that shouldn’t have a connection. It happened last year when I covered the Criterion releases of Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, and remarked about the spartan qualities of each film’s protagonist.
William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat couldn’t be more different in terms of narrative, but as I revisited both I couldn’t help but hone in on their fatalistic attitudes of their characters. Fatalism is a major theme in film noir, and its key characteristics include protagonists with limited agency, and whose actions are detrimental to those around them.
Man’s search for meaning in an absurd world is the drive of Sorcerer, Friedkin’s flawed interpretation of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s suspense thriller The Wages of Fear. I’m not one to call Friedkin’s film a direct remake, but it does take the premise and structure of the Georges Arnaud novel and thrusts four men into a dangerous proposition of driving trucks loaded with nitroglycerin through the jungles of South America.
Each character’s introduction is as rocky and odd as the dirt roads they travel. The opening sequence is a mishandled mosaic of character prologues to predispose us to their identities, but once they enter the belly of the beast they are devoid of much personality save for one. Roy Scheider’s Scanlon, the lone American, failed so horribly as a wheelman that he has to hide in South America. Guilt-ridden and alone, Scanlon is intriguingly complex. The other three are a different kind of bad news. Kassem (Amidou) is an Arab terrorist who detonates a bomb in Jerusalem and escapes Israeli forces. Manzon (Bruno Cremer) is a French embezzler who runs out of luck. Nilo (Francisco Rabal) is a sicario.
Where Sorcerer earns its reputation is the two-hundred mile journey to deliver explosives to a still-burning American oil rig. The danger is the cargo. The crates of dynamite they transport are an old supply where the nitroglycerin has seeped out. The “sweating” makes it highly sensitive to explode. One bad jostle and kablooey. The drive is fraught with suspense and we feel every bump as the mileage clicks up. The film’s best scene is inarguably the bridge-crossing sequence with the trucks going over a rope bridge in the rain as it sways back and forth. Nowadays this scene would be CGI-ed to hell, but the practical use of hydraulic components make it one of the most thrilling scenes ever constructed.
The reappraisal Sorcerer has received after its box office failure, and how it continues to find audiences at sold out repertory showings is a testament to its legacy. I will say the title didn’t do it any favors as it gives the impression that Friedkin had gone from a cop picture to horror to make a fantasy. (Also coming out a few weeks after Star Wars didn’t help box office returns.) Turns out the film’s title is taken from a Miles Davis record. Also, in the case of these four men transporting nitroglycerin through the jungle, the true “evil wizard” is fate itself. They new the risks, but even when they make the right choice in certain situations the outcome is preordained.
The idiom “the less said the better” is a great disclaimer for Friedkin’s approach with the material. Screenwriter Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) strips the dialogue to essentials as originally the role of Scanlon was intended for Steve McQueen (and the King of Cool didn’t like dialogue). Roy Scheider, on a hell of a run in the 1970s and having just done Jaws, is an archetypal flawed everyman hero in the mold of Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of Sierra Madre. Chief Brody as a desperate man in another harrowing situation doesn’t quite land, and I’m left to wonder who would have been a better Scanlon. Though, Scheider’s casting brought added cache thanks to the blockbuster success of Steven Spielberg’s shark movie. The fact he’s the standout in a cast of unknowns is not at all surprising.
Ultimately, what I enjoy most about Sorcerer is Friedkin pivots from exorcisms into a fever dream of a John Huston and Sam Peckinpah mash-up of flawed men and fatalism.
This Criterion release comes eleven years after Warner Bros. released it as a DigiBook title. At the time, the only extra was the DigiBook packaging, which included stills from the film and a long excerpt from Friedkin’s memoir, The Friedkin Connection. Considering Warner Bros. had no involvement in the film’s production and distribution (which ended up being handled by Universal and Paramount) the lack of extras is not surprising.
But in the hands of the boutique label, Sorcerer becomes one of the best physical media releases of 2025. The 4K DigiBook is three discs (one 4K UHD, two Blu-rays). All the extras are on the second Blu-ray disc and include the 2018 documentary Friedkin Uncut (108 minutes), “Sorcerers,” a 2015 conversation between Friedkin and filmmaker Nicholas Winding Refn (77 minutes), a 2025 conversation with Ringer podcaster Sean Fennessey and filmmaker James Gray (29 minutes) about the film’s legacy, 36 minutes of audio interviews with screenwriter Walon Green and editor Bud Smith, and an archival BTS featurette and trailer.
I love that Friedkin gives zero f*cks about what he does. He never considered himself an artist. He also thought himself as untouchable William Friedkin felt invincible after the success of The French Connection and The Exorcist. He didn’t have a blank check to make this suspense thriller, but he had some leniency as the grueling production ran into multiple snafus ballooning the budget from $15 million to $22 million. The film is a great zag compared to those two films that cemented his status and I feel Sorcerer is right choice for The Criterion Collection. Because if the film had been a hit we probably wouldn’t have his take on Hollywood.
“Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.”
From the explosiveness of Sorcerer to a detective reaching his boiling point in The Big Heat.
Fritz Lang’s 1953 film opens in perfect noir fashion. Gun on a desk. Camera pulls out to a man gripping the gun and pulling it out of frame. We hear a gunshot. Man sitting at desk falls into frame holding the gun. Dead. Wife comes down the stairs only to stop at the grandfather clock and finds her husband dead. She doesn’t scream. She cautiously walks to the desk and sees an envelope under the gun barrel. She opens the envelope and reads its contents. Picks up the phone. She doesn’t call the cops but phones a man who turns out runs a criminal enterprise.
A cold open this hot better deliver.
Lang nails it by crafting a bleak tale where our hero detective goes from family man to mirror the lowlifes he confronts. Glenn Ford (3:10 to Yuma, Gilda) is Dave Bannion, the detective sent to investigate the suicide of veteran cop Tom Duncan. He quickly surmises there was no foul play in the officer taking his own life. The question as to why is not as clear cut. Duncan’s widow, Bertha (Jeanette Nolan), says he was terminally ill. But after Bannion is contacted by Lucy Chapman (Dorothy Green), a call girl with whom Duncan was seeing, he begins to sniff around. Lucy contradicts the widow’s statement about an illness, and Bannion’s investigation starts to annoy crime boss Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) and his own police commissioner. In spite of warnings to stop the investigation Bannion’s actions complicate the lives of others. Particularly those of the female persuasion.
What is most striking about The Big Heat is how it doesn’t have a deadly femme fatale to lead Bannion astray. Neither Lucy nor Debby (Gloria Grahame), the mob doll to Lagana’s top errand boy Vince Stone (a ruthless Lee Marvin), destroy the wholesome family man. It’s almost as if Bannion is coated in Teflon and they become collateral damage. He sidesteps death after someone rigs his car with dynamite and it kills his wife. His defense of a woman in a nightclub leads a sadistic Stone to take out his frustrations on the flirtatious Debby. Lucy ends up strangled to death.
The manner in which story transforms as Bannion is taken out of his bucolic family life to be rough and tumble is a thing of beauty. Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat is a scintillating reminder that it doesn’t take much heat for altruistic heroes to abandon morals and either succumb to the lifestyle change or become a victim. Revered by Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann among others associated with crime pictures, the film offers a strong Glenn Ford performance, whose Bannion character might as well be the inverse of Heat’s Vincent Hanna, and fantastic support with Gloria Grahame as the mistreated beauty and Lee Marvin as a psychopath. (Marvin flinging a pot of hot coffee and disfiguring Grahame is spectacularly shocking and definitely a core memory for me as a film noir fan.)
Back in 2009, The Big Heat was released in a DVD box set titled Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I. It received the Blu-ray treatment several years later from the boutique label Twilight Time – first with a limited run before an encore release. This high-def version from Criterion includes a new 4K restoration by Sony Pictures from the 35mm camera negative and a 35mm fine-grain master positive.
The 4K disc includes a new audio commentary by film noir experts Alain Silver and James Ursini, authors of From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir. The commentary is also on the Blu-ray, along with two archived programs from the 2009 Columbia box set (Martin Scorsese’s reflections and Michael Mann discussing the expressionistic qualities and the uniqueness of the female characters), two audio interviews with Fritz Lang, and a long-form video essay from film critic Farran Smith Nehme (The Women of The Big Heat). A remastered trailer and illustrated leaflet with Jonathan Lethem’s essay “Fate’s Network” and technical credits round out the supplemental material.
There’s no denying that the great noirs are finally getting the high-def recognition they rightfully deserve. The Big Heat may not be on my personal Mount Rush-Noir but it is up there. So if you are the wee bit curious earmark it for a Barnes & Noble/Criterion Collection sale. And if you want to be really nihilistic, pair it with Sorcerer for a dynamite double feature.
Sorcerer
Grade: B
The Big Heat
Grade: B-
