Sorcerer, the movie for which William Friedkin wished to be remembered, is as taut and intense a thriller as any that has been made before or since. One of the reasons for this is how Friedkin strips the story down to its bare essentials: four men attempt to transport extremely unstable explosives two hundred miles to quell an oil fire. Other elements flesh out the narrative, but that description in and of itself illustrates how simple but raw the power of this movie is. Man vs nature; the ultimate and eternal struggle between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. In this sense, Friedkin understands how little audiences require of movies to affect them. If the essential structure is solid, everything else falls into place.

In an essay written after the director’s death, critic Owen Gleiberman notes that one of the main differences between Friedkin and his contemporaries (Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, De Palma) was their desire to push against the established boundaries of commercial filmmaking in order to create something approximating ‘art,’ in a popular sense. Friedkin, however, expressed no such interest. Given his background as a director of live television and documentaries as well as the evolution of his style throughout the early 1970s, his wish was to remove movie artifice and leave the viewer in a realistic depiction of a stark situation with nothing but their nerves and anticipation. Essentially, Friedkin rejected movies as ‘art’ and embraced the idea of a gut-induced, instinctual and spontaneous cinema. And Sorcerer is Friedkin’s definitive accomplishment in that realm. Ultimately, it came at a cost, both financially and his reputation in the business. In the previous five years, Friedkin’s two releases, The French Connection and The Exorcist, did bona-fide business, garnered much critical acclaim and awards, and gave him the opportunity to make just about any project he wanted in the exact way he saw fit. Costs be damned, if the man who made the most successful R-rated movie ever wanted to shoot in the Dominican Republic and Mexico and Paris and Jerusalem, he was allowed. In this sense, Sorcerer is also the culmination of Friedkin’s ability to get everything he needed out of a cast and crew despite the executives’ concerns of rising production costs.

By the time the movie was ready for release, the budget had ballooned far beyond its initial calculations but there was every reason to believe that with a smart marketing campaign it could be a success. However, no one could have predicted that a small-budget science fiction outer space movie released a month earlier could have done much business at all, let alone outearn virtually every movie in Hollywood history. The issue of Star Wars‘s impact on Sorcerer has been analyzed for decades, but it illustrates what was perhaps inevitable in the ever-changing landscape of the movies: by 1977 audiences wanted fantasy and escapism more than the hard-hitting, relentless cynicism that had been in vogue since the beginning of ‘New Hollywood’ around 1970. And directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were more than happy to oblige. Unfortunately for Friedkin, the philosophy of his filmmaking didn’t allow for the feel-good warmth and resolution that was soon to dominate. Instead, he continued to explore the theme that fascinated him most: the thin line between good and evil that exists in every human being.

Trends and box-office receipts aside, the real question is whether or not Sorcerer hold ups after all these years. And it most certainly does. Despite his two previous works becoming his legacy, it is this movie that is perhaps Friedkin’s greatest achievement as a director. No dialogue for long passages, intense visuals that are thoroughly compelling, and multiple locales give the story a universal quality, which buttresses its main theme: the need of humans, from different walks of life and worldviews, to work together at the expense of their natural tribalism and selfishness in order to survive. Such an idea will most likely never become obsolete.