105: Sorcerer & The Wages of Fear (with Peter Fishbeast) (Patreon)

Filmmaker Peter Fishbeast returns to the podcast from Belper, England to discuss the great director William Friedkin and his 1977 thriller Sorcerer.

Hot off two of the biggest hits of the seventies (The French Connection and The Exorcist), Friedkin decided to do his own version of one of the most acclaimed international films of all time, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, the tale of four desperate fugitives who are paid by an avaricious oil company to drive trucks full of nitroglycerine hundreds of miles to put out a raging fire at their refinery. It was an expensive and troubled production and had the bad timing of opening the same weekend that Star Wars was released widely across North America, heralding a cultural sea change in Hollywood that swept up his fellow auteurs in the New American Cinema of the seventies.

Peter and I compare Sorcerer and The Wages of Fear, the two different ways these films criticize U.S. imperialism, and how Friedkin’s misbegotten film eventually got a proper restoration in the 2010s and found a new audience. We also discuss the notorious international cut of Sorcerer, re-titled Wages of Fear and heavily tampered with by the worldwide distributor against the director’s wishes.

Plus: Peter tells us about the mood in the UK in the wake of the passing of Her Majesty.

Follow Peter Fishbeast on Twitter and visit his website.

Friedkin vs. Nicolas Winding Refn 

Trailer for Le Salaire de la peur (Clouzot, 1953)

Trailer for Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977)

Super 8 footage from the making of Sorcerer