Hollywood's wildest ever thriller?

Why William Friedkin's undersung masterpiece Sorcerer represents everything Hollywood has lost Alamy Friedkin, who died this week, may be best known for The Exorcist, but this wild 1977 thriller, which was a huge flop at the time, deserves just as much recognition, writes Christina Newland. Alamy Sorcerer tells the story of a group of criminals on the run – on a foolhardy mission to transport some nitroglycerine An ambitious, budget-busting adventure-thriller set in a South American oil refinery town and its surrounding mountainous jungle, Sorcerer was intended as a loose remake of Henri-Georges Cluozot's undisputed 1951 classic Wages of Fear. Alamy The film's highlight is an incredible action sequence in which the truck full of explosives is driven across a wonky rope bridge The budget soon spiralled out of control from a projected $15 million to $22 million, largely due to Friedkin's insistence on location shooting and documentary-style realism. In an alternate universe, Sorcerer never would have to be re-discovered, but would have been canonised from the start The fact remains that Friedkin's work – right up to Killer Joe, but certainly most pointedly in the case of Sorcerer, given its pivotal timing and fate – has come to represent something like a path less taken in American filmmaking.