Also did you like Johnny Dangerously? It was one of my favorite goofball movies.

No. I rarely like gangster movies. Indeed, almost never. By which I mean, movies entirely about gangster life (not movies that happen to feature gangsters). And that’s for a variety of reasons. Including the fact that I often find them boring and repulsive. Carlito’s Way is one of the extremely rare exceptions. And one could probably deduce why I don’t like gangster movies, by mapping out all the things Carlito’s Way does, that almost all other gangster movies don’t.

Wages of Fear is not that much like Sorcerer. It has the same rough plotline and some similar events (intentionally). But it differs from there on every measure. Comparing them is like comparing John Carpenter’s The Thing and The Thing from Another World. Apart from sharing the same rough plotline, they are not enough alike as films. Even the plot and events deviate in many ways. They do not use quite the same characters, do not share the same lighting and shooting, do not use the same setup, do not have the same conclusion, do not share hardly any of the same script. Aesthetically, I wasn’t as impressed with the black and white original. But I was also young, so I might not have been attuned to its qualities. It was certainly very critically acclaimed though. No slouch of a production for its time.

Except the film it was based on, The Wages for Fear.

I like Sorcerer, and I like what Friedkin did with it, but for me The Wages of Fear blows it out of the water. One of my favourite films ever.

That’s interesting. I saw all those films growing up. None really impacted me. Which may be for a variety of reasons.

I mention even in my article above why 2001 didn’t. Until later in life. I just didn’t get it; I needed more experience to. The others I don’t think spoke to our generation anymore. Billy Jack was amusing but out of date by the time I’d seen it, hardly significant anymore in a world where more of us were being affected by the morally similar but more progressive television series Kung Fu. Likewise, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner felt more like an interesting but no longer relevant historical piece in a world that would readily celebrate Lethal Weapon. It would be years into adulthood before I would realize there were still people who thought it was weird to have a black friend over for dinner; our family did all the time when I was growing up, and no one ever made a fuss—so that became my perception of the world at the time.

But sometimes the differences weren’t generational but a happenstance of just being more attuned to a different aesthetic for probably random reasons. Hence I just didn’t like most of the rather mean and self-centered humor of MASH; whereas the more serious antiwar comedy Catch-22 powerfully affected me in a way I can’t describe. I don’t think that means the latter was a better movie. Just that it had far more of an affect on me. For whatever reason. Which in this case is unlikely to be generational as both films came out in the same year, and that the year after I was born.