Sorcerer

The misleading title of this very expensive and rather needless remake of Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953) seemed, at the time, to be cashing in on Friedkin's huge success with The Exorcist (1973). The screenplay takes the same situation as the French thriller and expands on it, filling in more of the lives of the participants. They are four men of different backgrounds and nationalities (Scheider, American; Cremer, French; Rabal, Spanish; Amidou, Arab) who turn up in a seedy South American town where they are offered $10,000 by an American oil company representative to transport highly explosive nitroglycerine over 200 miles of rough terrain in two old trucks. Though not a patch on the Clouzot movie, it is still rather gripping, the photography is superb, there is an excellent use of sound and an eerie electronic score by Tangerine Dream.