SORCERER CASTS SPELL OVER VENICE

US exhibitors had no faith in a campy space opera from an untested director, so they booked the gritty action epic Sorcerer into their theatres a week after Star Wars launched. Ten days later, William Friedkin’s expensive reworking of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear had vanished and a new Hollywood mentality had been born. With a remastered version of his film debuting at the Venice Film Festival this week, the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist has been very vocal about the monumental flop that he considers his crowning achievement.

The Venice Film Festival has been kind to William Friedkin (pictured, above), the 78 year-old Chicago native who won the Best Director Oscar for The French Connection (1971) then would make the film many consider the greatest horror movie of all time, The Exorcist (1973). Most recently, he secured the Italian festival’s Best Directing honours for his Matthew McConnaughey vehicle, Killing Joe (2011).

The acclaim reaches its zenith in 2013, with the Festival organisers voting to award Friedkin the prestigious Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement award. Alberto Barbera (pictured, left), the Festival’s Director, stated in his submission to the Biennale Board of Directors, “William Friedkin has contributed in a prominent way – the revolutionary impact of which has not always been recognized – to the profound renewal of American cinema regarded as ‘the New Hollywood’.”

“[The award] was very unexpected, I must say, and I'll tell you what makes it even more so," Friedkin told the Los Angeles Times earlier this week. "When Venice started the lifetime achievement award in 1970, the first guy to win it was Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane made me want to direct movies. And when the festival started up again in the late 1940s after World War II, the first guy to win the Golden Lion was Henri-Georges Clouzot for Wages of Fear. It's all kind of a circle and I'm kind of overwhelmed to get the award."

The significance of French auteur Clouzot’s masterpiece is profound. To accompany his honour, Friedkin’s all-but-forgotten passion project, Sorcerer (1977), the English/Spanish remake of Clouzot’s influential work, will be relaunched in a fully-restored version in Venice. In technical speak, the 4k film resolution scan of the original 35mm camera negative will ensure the film is viewed with greater clarity than its original release print.

The initial failure of Friedkin’s opus hurt everybody. By mid-1970’s standards, its US$22million budget was exorbitant, but Friedkin had delivered two ground-breaking blockbusters and could write his own ticket. The film’s US$12million box-office take proved crippling; the slow-expansion release pattern that distributor 20^th Century Fox had planned was shelved when George Lucas’ Star Wars commanded every screen available. “The zeitgeist had changed by the time [Sorcerer] came out," Friedkin told The Wrap.com earlier this year.

Star Roy Scheider (pictured, right) bounced back by reprising the role of Chief Brody in Jaws 2 and getting Oscar-nominated for All That Jazz in 1979, but it was tougher for Friedkin. His controversial procedural Cruising, with Al Pacino as an undercover cop in the S&M gay nightclub scene, earned more headlines than dollars. Everything he lensed for the next decade (Deal of the Century, 1983; To Live and Die in LA, 1985; The Guardian, 1990; Blue Chips, 1994; Jade, 1995) tanked.

He recently confided to the Venice Film Festival website, “I consider Sorcerer my most personal film and the most difficult to achieve. To realize that it’s going to have a new life in cinema is something for which I’m deeply grateful. To have its world premiere at the Venice Festival is something I look forward to with great joy. It is truly a Lazarus moment.”

Sorcerer (so named after the truck that is central to film’s narrative journey) will move from its Venice berth into an arthouse release pattern before a new life in its restored form on Blu-ray. The rebirth of his most cherished project could not come sooner for the ageing auteur. “Sorcerer is the film that came closest to my vision of what I wanted to make,” he told the LA Times. “I have a great fondness for Sorcerer, more than any other film. It's the film I hope to be remembered for."