Gunshots and (Un)Answered Questions: Friedkin, Blu-ray and Endings

SPOILERS for Sorcerer, The French Connection


Little things mean a lot.

On Tuesday, a pair of highly anticipated blu-ray releases hit the streets: Sorcerer and Get Carter – two of the most grittily entertaining thrillers of the 1970s.

While each sported a marked upgrade in picture quality from their respective DVDs – particularly Sorcerer, which has long been an object lesson in how home video releases should not be handled – each also seemed to (at least for this viewer) create new problems.


Carter Takes a D(r)ubbing

Get Carter, for whatever reason, includes an infamously poor dubbing job in one of its scenes, despite having been released in Mike Hodges’ preferred original version for North American DVD about ten years ago. Although the affected screen time only amounts to a minute or so, it’s an important minute; Michael Caine, in one of the toughest and best performances of his lengthy career, is being gently scolded about his plans to go up north and investigate the death of his brother. His bosses remind him that he has no special allowances to stir up trouble among criminals with whom their group is allied.

Anyway, instead of sounding like grizzly British gangsters, they sound like goofy caricatures, transforming the scene into something resembling parody. It’s simply not believable that Caine’s ruthless Carter takes orders from these goofs. It hurts the film, particularly if you’re only familiar with the original U.K. language track.

Now, time will tell, but I’m hopeful that next month’s U.K. release will set things right. (I’ll gladly pay another tenner to have this scene restored. Maybe I can get five for the other copy at a used merchant.)


Less and More

No such luck for Sorcerer, which has been changed in a way that’s even less tangible, and even more profound.

The film originally ended with bone-tired Roy Scheider, having successfully delivered the nitro, being paid off in the cantina. He pauses, in a reflective mood, and takes a moment to dance with a local crone. Charlie Parker (with strings) plays “I’ll Remember April” as the camera pulls back, into the street, settling on an arriving taxi. Two men from New Jersey get out. Tangerine Dream’s crushing score slams home and the titles roll.

You can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1k4YROuh2g

This is what might be termed an “unambiguous ambiguous ending”; while it’s true that we don’t know for certain what’s happened to Scheider, viewers who’ve been paying even a modicum of attention will recognize the two men who get out of the taxi from earlier in the film – one, a gangster’s muscle; the other, Scheider’s “friend”, the one who arranged for his escape to the jungle in the first place.

In short, he’s a dead man, and his travails on the mountain road, on the bridge, eking out an existence in the horrid town – all for naught. Moreover, the man who fingers Scheider is really the only ally he has left in the world.

The ending’s arguably even more grim when you consider the possibility that the oil company had a hand in the character’s death. Note that the oil man insists on paying by cheque, telling Scheider the company’s fixed it so that he can cash it at a local bank, despite having no valid identification. Perhaps he doesn’t want to hand him $40,000 in cash for his own protection – they don’t have a combative or less-than-civil relationship in prior scenes – but it’s alternatively plausible that he knows what’s in store for Scheider and sees it as an expedient way to save the company some money. And how else would the two goons have known where he’d be at that exact moment?

It’s a haunting ending, made all the more so by Friedkin’s typically uncompromising decision to leave Scheider’s death off screen. But it’d probably be a mistake to call it “ambiguous”. In any case, the ending still has power and finality, largely thanks to the evocative menace of Tangerine Dream’s score. Then the title, Sorcerer, appears on the screen – still no less mystifying as a title, it should be said – putting a nice piece of punctuation on the end of this baffling and powerful film.

In any case, for whatever reason, Friedkin has decided to neuter this ending for its blu-ray release. (Perhaps “neuter” is too strong, but my blood’s still up since watching it last night.)

Now, once the two goons enter the cantina, beneath Tangerine Dream’s score, we hear a gunshot.

Yes, a gunshot. One straight out of a twenty-first century sound effects database. (These gunshots, like the ones used in the new audio mix for the Terminator, or the 1996 5.1 mix for Vertigo, will always sound utterly phony to my ears. Sadly, they are used throughout Sorcerer.)


So What

If you’ve made it this far, you may be asking yourself, “Does this qualitatively change the ending?”

Fair enough. For a few minutes after I’d turned off the blu-ray, that was essentially my reaction. But it put me in mind of something.


Parallels

If you’ve seen The French Connection, there’s a good chance you’ve got an opinion about that film’s final, pre-credits gunshot.

You’ll remember that Popeye Doyle has just gunned down a douchebag fed, by accident, though apparently without any subsequent remorse. Cloudy (Scheider again), Doyle’s partner, incredulously repeats, “You shot Mulderig.”

Doyle, barely breaking stride, not acknowledging the body at their feet, tells Cloudy that Frog 1 is “here” and that he’ll find him. Then he exits the frame around a corner and we hear the deafening final shot. No explanation is provided, but we learn through on-screen text over still frames that the two cops were reassigned and Charnier got away, so we can assume that Doyle fires that last shot or (at the very least) is not the victim of the shot, but nor is Frog 1.

One can only imagine the piss and vinegar running through Friedkin when he decided to include that inexplicable shot as punctuation to his first masterpiece. It gives the film, one that’s already bursting with documentarian-style detail, a feeling that its world is “lived in” – that it will continue to exist beyond the scope of the narrative. Popeye will continue to be a “great detective but a lousy cop” (to quote another notable crime film). But it also shows just how unglued Popeye has become. While viewers might have countenanced his behaviour rousting junkies earlier in the film, or even shooting the assassin in the back, we can’t follow him any further into the abyss.

(One wonders how the final shot would be interpreted if the film had dispensed with the explanatory text that follows. Maybe Doyle shot himself? Maybe he got the Frog?)

In any case, I love the ending of The French Connection – and the ending is that gunshot. It’s a bracing, powerful moment when realization hits home. Friedkin uses Ellis’ atonal score brilliantly here too, with waves of unearthly, hallucinatory sound.

Sorcerer doesn’t need such a moment. Rather, it has such a moment, but that moment is more powerful without such punctuation. The music does the work.

Now, if he’d opted to remove the score over that last shot, and include the sound of the gun going off, it might not feel quite so ham-fisted. But then we’d lose that awesome piece of music.


Bigger Issues?

I suppose one could take this opportunity to talk about the death of ambiguity in contemporary cinema, how this change embodies that, etc., but I don’t think that’s the problem; as I say, the ending wasn’t particularly ambiguous originally.

But unlike the one in The French Connection, this gunshot adds nothing. It feels like the director was worried about distracted or less observant viewers not understanding the ending. In short, it feels like an insult to the viewer’s intelligence. My son, who’s not yet twelve, reacted instantly to the familiar faces of the guys from New Jersey. He got it. He understood the implications immediately, and even if he hadn’t, the music communicates quite clearly that “this is not a happy ending”.