 A film in three minutes, Sorcerer. I've got a job for you. It won't be easy. You've got to drive a truck through the Amazon rainforest. The route? Treacherous mountains. The cargo? Highly volatile. Oh, and there's no guarantee you'll even survive the trip, so be prepared to have your limits pushed to the extreme. Think you're up to it? You'd better be, because in William Friedkin's 1977 masterpiece, Sorcerer, you don't have much choice. A loose remake of the 1953 feature, The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer's narrative follows the lives of four men who each have become outcasts, and now reside in a remote, poverty-stricken village in Columbia, out of money, and seemingly out of luck. That is until an explosion at the local American oil refinery presents the men with an opportunity to earn good pay, but more importantly, their freedom out of the country. The only problem is that they have to drive crude, the assembled trucks 218 miles over deadly terrain, transporting dangerously unstable nitroglycerin to extinguish the fire. If there was one adjective I could choose to sum up this film as a viewing experience, then it would undoubtedly be tense. As from the very outset, we are introduced to this grimy, unforgiving world, with its shady, hard-nosed personas constantly being doused in mud, rain, blood, sweat, and tears with a cold nihilistic eye from Friedkin's lens, who made no bones about the fact that each of the main characters are neither outright heroic or villainous, but somewhere in between and therefore unlikeable and often difficult to root for. Tense too could be used to describe the situation that Friedkin and crew faced on a daily basis as they wrestled bouts of malaria, food poisoning, injuries, gangrene, and hostility from locals whilst shooting, leading to approximately 50 people having to leave the project with the erratic hubristic director firing multiple production managers and the original director of photography. The film's iconic suspension rope bridge scene acts as a case in point of the shoot's chaotic development, with the set piece costing a reported $3 million to construct over several months for the 12-minute sequence, requiring the specially made bridge to be expensively disassembled and then relocated due to a drought at the original filming location. Sorcerer's dismal box office performance would only solidify its reputation as the first death knell of the fading new Hollywood era that had dominated the decade up to that point, but regardless of the initial reception to the film, Sorcerer has enjoyed a kind, even magical re-evaluation decades after its theatrical run, whose story acts as a fitting metaphor of an ambitious, self-destructive last hurrah of a mode of filmmaking and of a director's creative ego that, for better or for worse, is now long gone.