Deliverance (1972)

 

Deliverance (1972)

 

The title has proven obscure to many, so let me begin with that: It alludes to a biblical reference that the water will act to cleanse the sins of the world.

 

James Dickey’s “Deliverance” (1970) has remained one of the most respected American works of literature published since WWII. An Adventure story that echoed the works of Joesph Conrad, it told its simple, but potent, tale with exceptionally deft awareness of how to make unfolding circumstance follow a seemingly naturalistic cause-and-effect, instead of what it really was, a deliberately contrived plot. This gave Dickey room to weave together the rhythms of the lives of the Protagonists, Suburban males lost in a hostile Wilderness; the rhythms of that Wilderness which was larger, which had a history longer and deeper, than the perceptions of the interlopers could contemplate. It does not only demonstrate, but dissects the Violence that erupted when the men and the Wilderness came into terrible confrontation.

 

The film version, scripted by Dickey, trims many of the excesses inflicted on the novel with his sometimes self-conscious prose, eased off on the metaphysical rhetoric, but retained the potent themes. Importantly, it retained the novel’s triumph in what all great realistic fiction strives for – to make everything so rooted in its context that the exquisitely specific it becomes the true path to the universal. Director John Boorman immediately clicked, Dickey was given a small-but-significant part as a Sheriff, but soon the two over-sized personalities started to grate on each other, and Dickey was eventually banned from the set. Still, the integration of the two Artists was flawless in the end-product, it is considered one of USA cinema’s great Masterpieces.

 

The film starts leisurely as the Protagonists wind their way to their recreation, they are going white water rafting through a forest that is inaccessible by road and will soon be made extinct when the region is flooded by a dam project. Of these four men, only one is really prepared to handle the challenges outside the context of Civilization, Lewis (Burt Reynolds, a former Stunt Man, and by then B-list Leading Man, and this role that would bring him a much more substantial Stardom). As we know this is an Adventure film, we assume charismatic Lewis will the primary driver of events, and ultimately the Hero. Deftly, neither presumption would prove true, but his charisma and un-artificial machismo captivates the first half of the film. His dialogue operates on two levels: on the one hand he is obviously posturing, his skills and physique compared to the others grants him great narcissistic security; one the other, he is Author’s Dickey’s voice, he proves that even a Civilized man is capable of being a “Noble Savage,” and those longings ring more sincerely from his lips than they could’ve from any of the others. Lines like, "Survival, is the name of the game" and “Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything,” had to be spoken by him because the others hadn’t earned them.

 

The rest are in varying state of physical and emotional unpreparedness:

 

Drew (Ronny Cox), is at the same time the most conventionally stable person and the Artist (gifted guitar player). He’s unassuming, compassionate, and without an aggressive bone in his body. He is completely in the shadow of Lewis.

 

Bobby (Ned Beatty) is a bachelor and obnoxious, most likely he’s trying to use by force of his (insufferable) personality to compensate for being weak and obese.

 

Ed (Jon Voight), is a thoughtful, satisfied, Business and Family Man who doesn’t show much hint of what is, or is not, within his capacities.

 

Each is wonderful distinct, and together, these four represent one of the more memorable entourage casts in cinema.

 

At the edge of civilization is the town of Aintry, soon to be drowned by the power of the World these men came from, and coffins are being unearthed from the cemetery in anticipation of this. The locals and these tourists view each other as alien. Though none of the leads except Reynolds have movie-star good looks, but none of their faces are as scared by hard living as the Mountain Men they encounter, underlining the stark contrast of one group’s privilege and the other’s impoverishment.

 

Hostile indifference was the best that our four could’ve excepted given that they are marching through the death of the only World any of the locals have ever known, and Bobby’s boorish behavior only makes it worse.

 

Only Drew makes any attempt to bridge the gap, when he spontaneously engages a youngster (an albino, probably an outcast even within his own insular community) in an impromptu “banjo duel.” This arrangement, created by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell would be woven in to the rest of the film, achieved great acclaim, and went on the win a Grammy. Drew’s warm outreach to the boy was genuine, and he is confused when after the duet is finished, the boy refuses to shake his hand.

 

Vilmos Zsigmond’s Cinematography is stunning. The landscape is beautiful, much effort was made to film in a deeply isolated rural areas and convincingly untouched wildernesses as those described in the novel (the filming locations were Oconee County in South Carolina, the town of Slyva in North Carolina, the Cahulawassee River Rabun Gap, and Lake Tallulah Gorge and Falls in Georgia), but the colors are deliberately bleached, keeping any distracting Romanticism at bay. The actors themselves did the white-watering rafting, and those scenes are exhilarating, even in the first half of the film, before it became a plot point that a certain stretch of river is particularly deadly.

 

Wrote Reynolds, "Once there I learned the original cast had included Marlon Brando, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda, but then they were informed about the Chattooga, fifty miles of white-water hell and deadly waterfalls running from South Carolina to Georgia. On a danger scale of one to six, the river is rated a five - the second most dangerous river in the U.S. You aren't supposed to go down in a canoe unless you're an expert. Those big stars wisely got the hell out."

 

The most famous of the rafting sequences involved Lewis going over a ninety-foot waterfall. At first this was shot the sequence with a dummy, only to have the Director Boorman conclude the results looked "like a dummy going over a waterfall." The ex-stuntman Reynolds volunteered to go for the plunge, which was a mistake

"The first rock I hit cracked my tailbone like an egg...I turned several flips, hit something, doubled up, landed on my neck, and entered the hydrofoil at the bottom where the falls plunge back into the river...I'd come over the falls a thirty-five-year-old daredevil in perfect shape. When I surfaced about two hundred yards downriver, I was a nude seventy-five-year-old man-yes sir-without a stitch of clothes on." Returning from the hospital, Burt asked how the shot looked. "'Like a dummy going over a waterfall,' Boorman said."

 

The main plot is engaged when Ed and Bobby got lost in the woods. They encounter two Backwoods Men who are worse than the merely hostile Town Folk. Bobby makes the worst possible choice; he shows bluster that he can’t match with action. The Backwoods Men have guns, and can take what they want. The resulting rape scene was among the most brutal and demeaning such dramatized, not to be surpassed until the nine-minute-long savaging of Actress Monica Bellucci in “Irreversible” (2002). The physical aspect of the sexual violation is made deeply, emotionally, degrading by the verbal insults the men most endure, like Bobby while he’s on all fours and helpless, ordered to, “Squeal like a pig!” which became among famous lines in film history.

 

Lewis rescues his friends, killing the main aggressor (Bill McKinney) with his compound bow, and scaring off his toothless friend (Herbert "Cowboy" Coward). The killing was clearly justified, but there was no witnesses except the participants, and these four are strangers to the insular community. The men to choose to bury the body and escape the area quickly, "paddle on down to Aintry to get the cars and go home," without contacting the Authorities.

 

Trying to make their escape, and more panicked than they want to admit to themselves, Drew has neglected to put on his lifejacket. As the hit the rapids again, Drew inexplicably stands in his canoe, and goes overboard. The other three become frantic, soon all are in the water, and one of the canoes is splintered to pieces. Lewis is badly injured (the scene in which the Character Lewis broke his leg was ironically also the scene where the Actor Reynold broke his tail bone). Drew does not resurface and Lewis is convinced that the toothless Backwoods Man shot Drew, and is still above them on the cliffs, planning to pick them off one by one.

 

But with Lewis, the obvious choice of Hero, rendered helpless, the task of taking down the assailant falls on Ed, who isn’t even sure that they had been fired upon.

 

As night falls, Ed climbs the cliff, a nail-biting scene, and when he reaches the top, he sees his alleged enemy, but is too exhausted to properly use the compound bow. Though Ed manages to shoot first, it only wounds, not kills. Then Ed’s wounded and rendered helpless, but as the Backwoods Man closes in for the kill, he also succumbs to the first arrow.

 

Ed frantically checks the dead man’s mouth. The dead man has all his teeth, so he’s not the attacker from the earlier. As the trio failed to confirm that Drew had been shot, almost certainly, Ed just killed an innocent man. For the second time, the sink a body with rocks.

 

They continue down river, finding Drew's lifeless body lodged against a boulder and a fallen tree. They can’t find bullet wounds.

 

Bobby: What are you going to do with Drew?

Ed: If a bullet made this, there are people who can tell.

Bobby: Oh God, there's no end to it. I didn't really know him.

Ed: Drew was a good husband to his wife Linda and you were a wonderful father to your boys, Drew - Jimmie and Billie Ray. And if we come through this, I promise to do all I can for 'em. He was the best of us.

Bobby: Amen.

 

For a third time, they must secretly dispose of a body.

 

Their return to civilization is marked by the appearance of junked cars at the river's edge. After the Violence that defined the whole of the film on the river, the scenes after the characters return are, though tense, jarringly leisurely, and the rhythms of the first sequences are slowly regained.

 

The reduced, wounded, and exhausted group face suspicious Law Enforcement (that’s Dickey) who are investigating a missing Hunter in the woods who just happens to be related to one of the members of the tiny Police Department. But lacking proof, they have "nothin' to hold them for." The Sheriff intones, “Let's just wait and see what comes out of the river.” But another local (Pete Ware), driving Ed and Bobby to the hospital to see Lewis, unwittingly gives them words of hope, “All this land's gonna be covered with water. Best thing ever happened to this town.”

 

And then the three turn their backs on this hostile place that will soon cease to be, and return to lives safe and well-established. But there are still uncertainties and wounds, as demonstrated in the film’s famous closing image from Ed nightmare – a long shot of placid water made foreboding by sinister music, and then a dead hand breaches the surface.

 

It’s a rare Crime or Horror film in that it takes the time to address the Consequentialism of its own Violence, and it this one goes farther still, exploring the Consequentialism is Bourgeoisie luxury.

 

Deliverance received three academy award nominations, Best Picture, Best Director and Best Film Editing, though shockingly there was no such recognition for any of the actors.

 

The film is so strong and economical in its evocation of the rawness of a true test for survival that all similar films that preceded, like the very fine “Naked Prey” (1966), were erased from memory, while all those that followed could not escape the shadow of comparison. Walter Hill’s well-made “Southern Comfort” (1981), was trapped in the perception of being a rip-off that failed to credit the original. A better fate befell Greg McLean’s “Wolf Creek” (2005), which borrowed heavily this film as a road map to transcend the clichés of the Slasher movie, but only to avoided being accused of being overly derivative of this film by being charged with being overly derivative of another, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974).

 

Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3Jr7af1FrQ

“Dueling Banjos” scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf3wrZ-M35Y

Short documentary on the film, focusing on James Dickey’s larger than life persona:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXI3JDpeiAs