I very much agree. My wife and I knew we couldn't be the only ones who became aware of this similarity. Thank you so much for your side-by-side comparison. It shows just what was going through our minds when we watched The Wayward Bus for the first time a few months ago, having seen Sorcerer many times. The fact that it's raining hard in both scenes, the size and shape of the vehicles, the testing of the wood planks beforehand, the rushing river, the chunk of tree crashing into the bridge, the tilting of the vehicles, the barely making it across...I wonder if it was a conscious effort on Friedkin's part to make his own version of that scene from The Wayward Bus, or if he didn't realize he was redoing a scene from a movie he had watched as a young man.
I'm sure it was a conscious effort, it is too close to be otherwise. Contemporary filmmakers take from older films more than we might think. Friedkin just took the bridge crossing scene from The Wayward Bus to the next level. Brian dePalma borrows a lot, namely in The Untouchables, where he had the high suspense scene of the baby in a carriage careening down a staircase while a gunfight rages around it. The scene comes directly from the great Russian silent classic, Battleship Potemkin. And Rob Reiner too. In Misery, the sheriff who's onto the plot and about to solve the crime midway in the movie is suddenly killed off. That is a direct quote from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
I very much agree. My wife and I knew we couldn't be the only ones who became aware of this similarity. Thank you so much for your side-by-side comparison. It shows just what was going through our minds when we watched The Wayward Bus for the first time a few months ago, having seen Sorcerer many times. The fact that it's raining hard in both scenes, the size and shape of the vehicles, the testing of the wood planks beforehand, the rushing river, the chunk of tree crashing into the bridge, the tilting of the vehicles, the barely making it across...I wonder if it was a conscious effort on Friedkin's part to make his own version of that scene from The Wayward Bus, or if he didn't realize he was redoing a scene from a movie he had watched as a young man.
I'm sure it was a conscious effort, it is too close to be otherwise. Contemporary filmmakers take from older films more than we might think. Friedkin just took the bridge crossing scene from The Wayward Bus to the next level. Brian dePalma borrows a lot, namely in The Untouchables, where he had the high suspense scene of the baby in a carriage careening down a staircase while a gunfight rages around it. The scene comes directly from the great Russian silent classic, Battleship Potemkin. And Rob Reiner too. In Misery, the sheriff who's onto the plot and about to solve the crime midway in the movie is suddenly killed off. That is a direct quote from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.