On Remakes

Rarely are remakes worth discussing. The list of disappointing and downright embarrassing remakes is too long to list here and it’s not worth the research to be reminded of most of them.

There is only one exception that I’m aware of and in this case both – the original and the remake – are two of my favorite films. Whichever one I’m watching is the better version and I’m continually pulled back and forth weighing the merits of one over the other.

That is what remakes are supposed to do. The original is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Le Salaire de la Peur” (“The Wages of Fear),” a 1953 black and white French classic from the novel by Georges Arnaud that is a favorite of cineastes and film snobs and deservedly so. Clouzot also made “Les Diaboliques” (“The Devils”), which thankfully he got the rights to just hours before Alfred Hitchcock could.

The remake is William Friedkin’s 1977 “Sorcerer,” a film legendary in movie-making lore for running over budget, being so difficult to shoot that the cinematographer quit, and for pretty much ending the up-to-then brilliant career of William Friedkin (“French Connection,” “Exorcist”). Slamming the last nail, “Sorcerer” was released and then disappeared within weeks.

While I had seen “Wages of Fear” in film school decades ago and loved it, I had never heard of “Sorcerer” and one night in the mid-1980s in New York City in the wee hours while I was a tad stoned, HBO ran it and I watched the opening credits thinking that the director of “The Exorcist” was pumping out whatever was left in the devil bag. And then I sat there mesmerized while the film wove its disparate stories of violence and despair into a cohesive narrative. It wasn’t until the storyline that is the center of both films appeared that I realized that “Sorcerer” is a remake of “Wages of Fear.”

The story is one of lost souls in a Latin American backwater oil town – “Sorcerer” explains how they got there, “Wages” doesn’t – that are faced with the same dilemma: Transport unstable dynamite by truck over several hundred miles of jungle and mountain roads to put out an oil rig fire and get enough money to get out of the third-world hell hole, or slowly die in a hopeless pit of despair.

Both films have an international cast with Yves Montand in his first leading role in “Wages” and Roy Scheider starring in “Sorcerer” with supporting casts doing exactly what they were hired for. One could quibble back and forth between the films as to whether the technical advances made in the twenty-five years after “Wages” gave “Sorcerer” an edge in cinematography and acting style, whether the back stories of the characters in “Sorcerer” is necessary to the narrative, whether Clouzot’s presentation of the third world as backdrop (it was filmed in southern France) compared to the in-your-face, on-location squalor that Friedkin milks for all it’s worth, and on and on and on.

If there is a failing in “Wages” that doesn’t appear in “Sorcerer,” it is the character of Linda, a ditzy and attractive local girl who plays a romantic, comedic foil to Yves Montand’s Mario. Linda, played by Vera Clouzot, the director’s wife who also appears in “Les Diaboliques,” works in the cantina washing the floors, working the bar and waiting the tables. While Clouzot takes a simpler, modern-fable type approach to the material than Friedkin, Linda is a distraction in the form of a love interest. Which is humorous considering that this is just the type of manipulation that Hollywood is being constantly chastised for. Or maybe it is the type of device that the French New Wave – less than a decade away – would react so rabidly against.

Or maybe Linda was in the book. Both films claim to be based on Georges Arnaud’s novel Le Salaire de la Peur and this is one of the few cases where I watched a film and then wanted to read the book rather than having read the book and then been disappointed by the movie. The book is out of print and I’ve been haunting East Village used bookstores trying to scrounge a copy. It really doesn’t matter in terms of comparing these two films or any film made from a book since filmmakers always look to books as places to jump off from and not as a place to land. If I find the book I’ll update this section.

What this all boils down to is the world view of the viewer and how one sees the workings of fate, kismet or what most people erroneously call karma. In “Wages” – which takes a whimsical we-bring-all-this-misery-on-ourselves approach – the wages of fear are paid in full when due. In “Sorcerer” – which explores the back-stories of the men involved – the wages of fear are allowed to fester and accrue interest and are collected when the character least expects it.

Obviously, both approaches are — as they say — valid and I’m not going to split hairs on the wrong side of the dog trying to make a case of one over the other although I wish Clouzot had found a different way to express what he was going for with the ending he choose.