The late William Friedkin sought this production as his next film following the runaway box-office/critical success of THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST. In many ways, this represents the ultimate Friedkin experience, where his artistic ambitions, as well as his budget doubled, leading to co-production financing from both Universal and Paramount.

Heralded a critical and financial failure upon its release, SORCERER (originally titled “Ballbreaker”) has grown to encapsulate so much of the brilliance of Hurricane Billy’s career, as well as cinema as a whole, that it looks positively embarrassing to view the critical establishment of that time as steadfast thinkers. This is hard-boiled filmmaking at its most steely-eyed and tight-fisted, where its ambitious scope encapsulates more than just death-defying special effects and stunt-work, holding within its lean and mean framework a haunting piece of fatalistic storytelling, where a good man is hard to find, but a dull one is even harder.

Exploding across screens in 1977, SORCERER failed to land its proper audience for a myriad of reasons involving bad-faith critics moaning about massively ballooning budgets, “proper” adaptations (it was a loose remake of H.G. Clouzot’s 1953 French classic, THE WAGES OF FEAR), and studioheads afraid of confidently promoting such a hot cocktail of blood-boiling anger and nerve-shredding excitement; it also premiered a few weeks after a movie called STAR WARS shook the box-office for all its pitiful worth, leaving SORCERER, along with its hypnotic Tangerine Dream score, to land an almost silent thud in multiplexes across the country.