John Boorman (1972)
Adapted by James Dickey from his own (1970) novel, Deliverance tells the story of an adventure weekend from hell. Four Atlanta men in their mid-thirties drive to the north Georgia wilderness. They plan to canoe down the river, taking in the unspoiled natural beauty of the area before it disappears forever: the Cahulawassee River valley is soon to be flooded by construction of a dam[1]. The quartet’s experience of the great outdoors varies widely. Lewis (Burt Reynolds) is the proven action man of the party. His friend Ed (Jon Voight) has accompanied him on expeditions before. Bobby (Ned Beatty) and Drew (Ronny Cox) are tenderfoots. The men’s views about what’s to happen to the river valley differ too. Lewis is alone in bitterly lamenting the loss of the ‘last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unfucked-up river in the South’ – the coming ‘rape’ of the landscape.
John Boorman doesn’t immediately announce the ghastliness to come. (Ari Aster and the Jordan Peele of Us would do well to note.) The opening of Deliverance is ominous partly because it’s hard to put your finger on what’s making it so. Shots of the river and bulldozers encroaching on the surrounding landscape are accompanied by the voices of the four men arguing, vigorously but good-naturedly, over whether or not the damming and creation of what Lewis derides as ‘a big, dead lake’ is progress: why is that juxtaposition of image and sound unnerving? Once the weekenders appear, the camera’s occasionally slithering movement seems to suggest it’s looking at something neither these characters nor the audience can see. The lack of accompanying music is another contributor to atmosphere – until, that is, one of the film’s best-known sequences, featuring virtuosity and humour at the same time as it raises the discomfort level.
This is the ‘Dueling Banjos’ duet of Drew on guitar and a teenage boy (Billy Redden) on banjo. The latter’s face is an undoubted and a twofold element of the discomfort – viewers may well recoil from his extraordinary appearance and feel guilty about doing so. (This one did.) The teenager, named Lonnie in the credits, isn’t the first unusual and unappealing local specimen to appear. Two of the tourists have already muttered about ‘genetic deficiencies’ of their hosts; when Lonnie then appears, he looks the epitome of hillbilly inbreeding. The accelerating tune he plays with – or, rather, against – the affable, musically stimulated Drew is both exhilarating and alarming. The musical duel ends and Drew offers to shake Lonnie by the hand but the boy silently refuses and turns away. One of the two elements that still makes Deliverance startling to watch is its pretty blunt equation of warped physiognomy and moral dereliction – an equation foretold in Lonnie’s jolting presence and behaviour.
The Atlanta quartet arrives in the area on a Friday afternoon. (The plan is to be back home Sunday afternoon, ‘in time for the football game’.) There are a few minor tensions within the group, only two of whom (Ed and Lewis) are already friends, but the mood is convivial as they camp out on their first night. Deliverance‘s other enduringly shocking element is what happens the following morning, which catalyses the whole of the subsequent plot. The men travel in two canoes and one pair is temporarily separated from the other. As Ed and Bobby land, they’re confronted in woodland by two locals (Bill McKinney and Herbert Coward), one of them armed with a shotgun. After a brief verbal exchange, the backwoodsmen tie Ed to a tree and order porky Bobby to strip. One of them assaults him, twisting Bobby’s ear and telling him to ‘squeal like a pig’, before sodomising him. The other, conspicuously toothless man takes grinning pleasure in watching this, while continuing to hold Ed at gunpoint. Bobby’s squeals and cries of pain are heard by Lewis and Drew. Unseen by the attackers, they approach just as the hillbillies prepare to sexually assault Ed. Lewis fires an arrow from his recurve bow, killing the man who raped Bobby. The toothless man runs off into the woods.
When I saw Deliverance on its original release, at the age of seventeen, I’d never before seen anything like this on a cinema screen. At the age of sixty-four and thousands of films later, I’ve still not seen too much to compare. This episode is both the crux of the film and the start of a nightmare that is nearly unrelenting until the closing stages. (Even then, sanctuary is more apparent than real.) Bobby’s brutal humiliation is so gruellingly realistic and protracted that its horror is of a different order from subsequent events yet the speed of these is more than enough to convey a sense of things spiralling out of control. Lewis and Drew argue about what do next; Bobby and Ed take Lewis’s side and the four men bury the corpse of Bobby’s torturer before hastily resuming their journey down the river. They soon hit a perilous stretch of rapids, where Drew falls into the water and disappears. The canoes collide on rocks and Lewis sustains a terrible leg injury. Hair-raising and dreadful as these events are, they’re recognisable action-thriller crises in a way the preceding rape wasn’t. Yet the aftershock of that assault boosts the terrific momentum that Boorman, his DP Vilmos Zsigmond and editor Tom Priestley give to the ordeal on the river.
Weaknesses in the material are visible below the compelling surface. The rape of Bobby resoundingly echoes Lewis’s opening prediction of the rape of the land and it isn’t the screenplay’s only example of rhyming that’s fancy but crude. The first thing Ed does after getting up on Saturday morning is try and shoot a deer with Lewis’s bow and arrow; his nerve fails and the animal runs away. On the Sunday morning, he wakes to see the man he’s been pursuing – the toothless man who witnessed the murder of his partner in crime – a short distance away. Like the deer, the man doesn’t know Ed is there; unlike the deer, he doesn’t survive the encounter. In the meantime, Ed has achieved the improbably stupendous feat of climbing (with bow and arrows) all the way up from the rocks, where Bobby has stayed with the stricken Lewis, to the top of a sheer cliff[2].
There are compensating ambiguities in Boorman’s direction, though. The Atlanta visitors’ early complacency and more persisting sense of superiority are unmissable but never overdone. Although his companions assume that Drew must have been shot by the toothless man, his death by drowning could just as well be suicidal: when they get back on the river, Drew, after his unavailing attempts to persuade Lewis and the others to inform the police of what happened in the woods, declines to wear a lifejacket. Just as the cause of his fall into the water remains unclear, so neither Ed nor Bobby is sure that the man Ed has slain is the other woodland assailant – even though he looks, to them and to the audience, very similar and similarly in dire need of dental treatment. These identity doubts sharpen a viewer’s awareness of seeing the hillbillies through prejudiced, they-all-look-the-same-these-people eyes.
The argument over burying the rapist’s corpse is a rare static and wordy segment. This lack of movement and surfeit of dialogue make you notice the disputants’ symbolic accoutrements – pragmatic Lewis in his action-man outfit vs decent, conscientious Drew, the only member of the foursome who wears spectacles. Even so, the length of the debate contrasts effectively with the later decisions – increasingly rapid, nearly instinctive – taken by Ed and Bobby to survive and protect themselves. In Aintry, the small town downriver that was always the men’s planned destination, they tell the police that Drew’s drowning was accidental. They say nothing about their experiences with the two locals killed by Lewis and Ed. Deliverance segues from savage drama generated by forces of nature – the powerful river and the feral locals – into a tale of submerged secrets.
The Wikipedia entry for James Dickey’s novel makes clear that Ed is a graphic artist, Lewis a landlord, Drew a soft drinks executive and Bobby an insurance salesman. Only the last-named’s job is mentioned in the screenplay but the omissions scarcely matter: there are definite characterisations from all four actors. Ed, the first-person narrator of the novel, is the central consciousness of the film. (It seems that he’s a friend of each of the other three men, none of whom knows the other two well.) It isn’t on the level of his work in Midnight Cowboy but Jon Voight gives a first-rate performance. Even before doing so becomes a necessity, Ed always seems to be keeping something hidden. (When Lewis presses to know why Ed accompanies him on ‘these trips’, the answer is, ‘You know, sometimes I wonder about that’.) This elusiveness counterpoints Voight’s natural emotional candour and open face, which ensure that you root for Ed from start to finish.
Ned Beatty was making his film debut. Now retired, he’ll probably be best remembered for the role of Bobby – more specifically, for what happens to Bobby – but Deliverance gave Beatty’s screen career a well-deserved, considerable impetus. In the next few years, he would feature in such films as Nashville, All the President’s Men, Network and Wise Blood (among numerous others). He’s especially good here in expressing the usually garrulous Bobby’s hushed shock in the aftermath of his harrowing experience in the woods. Beatty and Ronny Cox were both cast after Boorman had seen them in a play in Washington, though you can’t help wondering if Cox’s guitar-playing skills were what really landed him the role of Drew. Deliverance was an important film for Burt Reynolds, who was keen to get into movies more substantial than the ones he’d been making. He’s OK but there’s a shallowness about Lewis that you sense is a quality of the actor playing him rather than of the character. Casting someone a bit less effortlessly alpha-male might have given Lewis more friction. As it is, Reynolds is most striking after Lewis suffers his injury. He makes it easy to believe that being immobilised and deprived of the means to assert himself is, for this man, a fate worse than death.
James Dickey himself makes a short but telling appearance as the Aintry sheriff who doesn’t believe the survivors’ story but isn’t able to bring them to book. ‘Don’t ever do nothin’ like this again – don’t come back up here,’ he tells them. It’s fitting that Bobby is the one who replies, ‘You don’t have to worry about that, Sheriff’. I hadn’t seen Deliverance for forty-seven years, which may be about the right length of interval. This often horrifying adventure thriller is not easy to watch. It’s gripping, though, and, nearly half a century on, still impressive.
15 March 2020
[1] Although the place names are fictional, the setting was inspired by real locations. The Coosawattee River in northwestern Georgia was dammed and flooded by a reservoir in the 1970s; the process was completed a few years after James Dickey wrote his novel and the film was made. Deliverance was shot mostly in northeastern Georgia, the canoe sequences on the Chattooga River.
[2] Not that improbably stupendous, it turns out. According to Wikipedia: ‘The film is infamous for cutting costs by not insuring the production and having the actors perform their own stunts (most notably, Jon Voight climbed the cliff himself)’. The same note also records that: ‘In one scene, the stunt coordinator decided that a scene showing a canoe with a dummy of Burt Reynolds in it looked phony; he said it looked “like a canoe with a dummy in it”. Reynolds requested to have the scene re-shot with himself in the canoe rather than the dummy. After shooting the scene, Reynolds, coughing up river water and nursing a broken coccyx, asked how the scene looked. The director responded, “like a canoe with a dummy in it”.’
