Il salario della paura

When he was casting 'The French Connection', director William Friedkin had wanted an actor who had impressed him in a couple of films by Luis Bunuel with the initials 'F.R.' to play 'Frog One'. Unfortunately, instead of Francesco Rabal he got Fernando Rey!

Friedkin later rectified that error by employing him in this film; but 'Sorcerer' seems a title almost calculated to alienate audiences who had come to see the next film by the director of 'The Exorcist'. Anyone who knew it was a new version of the novel by Georges Arnaud on which the classic thriller 'The Wages of Fear' (1953) was based were likely to be similarly confounded by the lengthy (and bloody) preamble set in Jerusalem, Paris and New Jersey before finally arriving in South America and then hitting the road.

The original took a long time to get moving too, but this new version is strangely uninvolving despite looking great, atmospherically scored by Tangerine Dream and conveying only too graphically on screen what hard work it must have been to shoot.