A Sorcerer by any other name...

Preview picture spread for Sorcerer, from the August 1977 issue of UK film journal Films and Filming... I spotted this earlier whilst leafing thru an issue of Films and Filming and I was surprised to see William Friedkin's film presented to British and Irish audiences under its original title, rather than the international Wages of Fear title. Films and Filming often ran previews well in advance of release dates, and I wonder was it the intention of the UK distributor, at this early stage, to release the film under the Sorcerer title, and reap the benefit of the tenuous link to the The Exorcist ?

I couldn't nail down an exact theatrical release date for the film on this side of the Atlantic, but it seems the film was in UK theatres by February 1978 - enough time perhaps for the UK distributor to rethink its strategy in the face of the dismal Stateside performance of the film. The director himself writing in his 2013 memoir, offered a combination of theories for the film's failure, among them, the ill-advised choice of title which seemed no more profound than the director borrowing it from Miles Davis' 1967 album which he had been listening to at the time. Friedkin himself wanted to call the film Ballbreaker, which might have looked good stenciled on one of the trucks, but studio boss Lew Wasserman flatly refused. Interestingly,  Films and Filming's review of the Wages of Fear eventually appeared in the May 1978 issue and its inclusion almost feels like an afterthought, considering the lag behind the film's roll out across UK and Irish cinemas earlier in the year. The magazine's chief critic Gordon Gow praised the film's moody atmosphere but felt the film was "careful but dull". To further dispel interest in the film, Gow signed off his review with a touch of regret that the Wages of Fear was a clumsy abridgment of the longer Sorcerer and warned this version of the film had been disowned by its director.

And then there was the matter of Star Wars. The unveiling of George Lucas's film preceded Friedkin's by a week but it proved a disastrous bit of scheduling - while the queues were snaking around the corners for Star Wars (with some patrons making their second and third visit), Sorcerer was playing to empty theatres. It was enough a signal a sea change in the tastes of film goers who evidently had grown tired of pessimistic character-driven dramas, embracing instead Star War's swashbuckling juvenile fantasia. And yet, four decades on, Sorcerer has been rediscovered by a younger generation who cherish the films made in that halcyon era of American Cinema when art briefly trumped commerce, the film now considered one of the finest films of the decade, and the high-water mark where the wave finally broke and rolled back.