Sorcerer (1977)

I realise this review is 40-years late, but I only saw Sorcerer at the weekend.

The film for the uninitiated was a remake of The Wages of Fear (or a re-adaptation of the source novel), about truck drivers carrying unstable nitroglycerin over treacherous jungle roads.

At the time it was released, Sorcerer was considered a box office failure - partly attributed to the fact that it had been released around the same time as Star Wars. Symbolically it can be seen as American New Wave Cinema being replaced by the Hollywood Blockbuster - or art versus commerce.

Having seen both, I'd put it down to Sorcerer not being a particularly likable film.

There's a lot in Sorcerer to be admired. Some of the sequences - particularly those on a storm-swept wooden suspension bridge - are nail-bitingly tense. There's a final hallucinatory sequence, which had me wondering if the characters were actually in Hell all along, which is also quite brilliant.

And of course there's the score by Tangerine Dream, which suits the film perfectly.

The problem for me was the characters. After a bunch of overlong introductory sequences, I didn't really know anything about the characters - and I didn't care too either. I think I had more emotional connection with my popcorn than I did with anyone on the screen. Watching them in peril was like watching a trapeze artist - yes, you're going to gasp if it looks like he is going to fall - but that's simple human empathy at work, nothing deeper.

It's an interesting film, and well worth catching on the big screen if possible, but if this was the direction in which 70s cinema was going, I'm happy to cheer on the usurper.

The Graduate (1967)

Until last night, I had never seen The Graduate.

I had previously caught bits and pieces of it - the finale at the church has been shown so many times in isolation that it was hard to escape it, but I had never watched the whole film from start to finish.

Since it is  currently back in cinemas for its fiftieth anniversary, I thought I'd finally get around to correcting that missing piece of my movie education.

The first thing that I always wonder about is whether a film holds up after all those years. What might once have been a classic can with hindsight, turn into an embarrassment of naive craftsmanship and clunky scripting that no one is prepared to call time on. Certainly there should be an understand of the period in which a film was made, but we also have to appreciate that we've moved on from the time when audiences used to flee from the sight of a locomotive being projected on a screen in a circus tent. There are classics and there are historical artifacts - the two are not always found in the same movie.

In the case of The Graduate though, they are. Cinematographically the film holds up well. The pallet is certainly one of the sixties - the use of colour is something that's often lacking from today's films. Desaturated colours have their time and place, but sometimes you want something a bit brighter. The direction of the camera also holds up - with the occasional shot or cut that dates the film poorly - Benjamin's reaction to the naked Mrs Robinson or any of those zoom shots felt more distracting than useful to me.


Music-wise, the Simon and Garfunkle songs are brilliant (although very much of the period) - the lyrics for Mrs Robinson finally coming in as the car emerges from the tunnel was pure cinema - and for some reason I was reminded of the Burt Bacharach music for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (two years after The Graduate, and also featuring Katharine Ross).

The story itself doesn't feel stuck in the sixties. Benjamin's attitudes seem perfectly contemporary, which probably says much about the effect that sixties sexual politics still have today. The treatment of women doesn't seem to have moved on much either.

Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock looked like the part that fifteen years later would have been portrayed by a young Tom Cruise - and frankly I think young Cruise could have pulled it off better. Certainly Hoffman manages the nervous awkwardness well, but he didn't quite convince me enough as the type of young man who would so easily gain the interest of Mrs Robinson and the affections of Elaine Robinson. A bit too much blank-stare acting too for my liking - although it served him well enough in Rain Man.

The portrayal of the female characters in the film is uncomfortable - Bancroft's Mrs Robinson comes across as a sexual predator in early scenes, and then devolves into a scheming psychopath all to ready to cry rape to suit her own purpose, while Ross's Elaine seems to fall for Benjamin's charms a little too easily.

However, switch the genders for Mrs Robinson and Benjamin, and make the accusation of rape a threat of violence, and I probably wouldn't be concerned about the character's portrayal - so perhaps the truth in the situation compensates for my concerns about the prejudicial characterisation. It's something that's unlikely to resolve itself easily for me.

As for Elaine, I think her final expression on the bus redeemed her character. For me, that look of uncertainty justified every other decision her character made in the film.