Remakes may feel like the name of the game these days, but it’s always been like this. What’s changed is the availability of the original. Saw How to Train Your Dragon in theaters? Watch the animated version on Peacock today! Kids loved Lilo & Stitch? Show them the better version on Disney+ as you drive home!

That component wasn’t always the case. And when audiences lined up to see William Friedkin’s Sorcerer in 1977, there was a good chance they hadn’t seen the previous iteration, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 French thriller, The Wages of Fear. Even if they had, they hadn’t seen it in Clouzot’s intended glory because U.S. distributors heavily censored the movie, excising almost 30 minutes of material they deemed anti-American.

Not that many saw Sorcerer when it came out, either. The movie was released one month after Star Wars changed the cinematic landscape, and audiences decided they were done with journeys into the heart of darkness. Friedkin, who scored big earlier in the decade with The French Connection and The Exorcist, was out and the blockbusters of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were in.

But time can be kind to the movies that fall through the cinematic cracks. The Wages of Fear was properly restored and released into U.S. theaters in 1992, and Sorcerer has enjoyed a surprising reappraisal on the repertory circuit. Now, both are available on gorgeous 4K UHD/Blu-ray sets from The Criterion Collection. What a sweaty double feature these two make.

Both versions are derived from Georges Arnaud’s 1950 book and employ the same premises: Deep in the South American jungle, an American-owned oil well has blown and turned the facility into a fiery hellscape. The only way to salvage the well is to blow it out with nitroglycerine. But the nitro is stored in a dilapidated town hundreds of miles away. Between the two are winding mountain roads, rickety bridges, and an obstacle not even the oil executives know about. Transporting such an explosive substance via truck over such a terrain would be suicide. So they find four men with nothing to lose, promise them an exorbitant wage for their risk and hope for the best. And if the men die, well, no one is going to miss them.

That sentiment is as callous in the movies as it reads on the page. Neither filmmaker softens the exploitation—either of the men or the South American villages. But Friedkin goes one step further in testing the limits of your empathy by making his four (an embezzler, a contract killer, a terrorist, and a mobster) reprehensible characters while reminding you no one is just one identity. Are we the sum of past choices, or can we strive to be more?

The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer are both bleak as hell but so expertly made it’s hard not to sit in awe of them. Some stories really are worth telling over and over again. This is one such story.

The Wages of Fear / Le salaire de la peur (1953)
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jérôme Géronimi
Based on the novel by Georges Arnaud
Produced by Raymond Borderie, Henri-Georges Clouzot
Starring: Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck, William Tubbs, Véra Clouzot, Folco Lulli
Cinédis, Not rated, Running time 156 minutes, Premiered May 15, 1953 at the Cannes Film Festival

Sorcerer (1977)
Directed by William Friedkin
Screenplay by Walon Green
Based on the novel by Georges Arnaud
Produced by William Friedkin
Starring: Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Amidou, Francisco Rabal, Friedrich von Ledebur, Ramon Bieri, Peter Capell
Paramount Pictures, Rated R, Running time 121 minutes, Opened June 24, 1977

---

The above review first appeared on boulderweekly.com, “Sweaty double feature.”