Deliverance

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Deliverance
Movie poster by Bill Gold
Directed by	John Boorman
Produced by	John Boorman
Written by	Novel: James Dickey Screenplay: James Dickey Uncredited: John Boorman
Starring	Jon Voight Burt Reynolds Ned Beatty Ronny Cox James Dickey
Cinematography	Vilmos Zsigmond
Editing by	Tom Priestley
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	July 30, 1972
Running time	109 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Deliverance is a 1972 American thriller film produced and directed by John Boorman. Principal cast members include Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox, and Ned Beatty in his film debut. The film is based on a 1970 novel of the same name by American author James Dickey, who has a small role in the film as a sheriff. The screenplay was written by Dickey and an uncredited Boorman.

In 2008, Deliverance was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

[edit] Plot

Four Atlanta businessmen – Lewis (Reynolds), Ed (Voight), Bobby (Beatty), and Drew (Cox) – decide to canoe down the fictional Cahulawassee River in the remote Georgia wilderness, expecting to have fun and see the glory of nature before the river valley is flooded over by the upcoming construction of a dam and lake. Lewis, an experienced outdoors-man, is the de facto leader. Ed is also a veteran of several trips but lacks Lewis' machismo. Bobby and Drew are novices.

From the start, it is clear the four are far from what they know as civilization. The locals are crude and unimpressed with the presence of outsiders, and the film implies that some of them are inbred. Drew briefly connects with a local banjo-playing boy by joining him in an impromptu bluegrass jam. But when the song ends, the boy turns away without saying anything, refusing the impressed Drew's handshake. The four "city boys", as they are called by one of the locals, exhibit a slightly condescending attitude toward the locals; Bobby, in particular, is patronizing.

The men spend the day canoeing down the river in pairs before camping by the riverside at night. Shortly before they retire for bed, Lewis tells the others to be quiet before disappearing into the dark woods to investigate a sound he heard. He returns shortly after and says that he didn't find anything. When asked whether he heard "something or someone," he tells them he doesn't know. While traveling the next day, the foursome's two canoes are briefly separated. Pausing briefly to get their bearings, Bobby and Ed encounter a pair of unkempt hillbillies (Bill McKinney and Herbert 'Cowboy' Coward) emerging from the woods, one wielding a shotgun. After a stray comment about moonshine offends the hillbillies, Bobby is forced at gunpoint to strip naked. McKinney's character chases after and physically harasses Bobby as he tries to escape. His ear is twisted to bring him to his hands and knees, and he is then ordered to "squeal like a pig" as McKinney's character rapes him. Ed is bound to a tree with his own belt, helpless as McKinney's character violently sodomizes Bobby.

Hearing the commotion, Lewis (who is wary of danger in the woods) secretly sneaks up and kills the rapist with an arrow from his hunting-bow; meanwhile, the other captor quickly escapes into the woods. A brief but heated debate ensues between Lewis and Drew about whether to inform the authorities. Lewis argues that they would not receive a fair trial, as he claims that the entire local population are related to one another, and the jury would comprise the dead man's friends and relatives. Likewise, Bobby does not want the incident of his sodomy to become public. Lewis tells them that since the entire area would be flooded by a lake soon, the body would never be found and the escaped hillbilly could not inform the authorities since he had participated in the incident. The men vote to side with Lewis's recommendation to bury the dead hillbilly's body and continue as though nothing had happened. During the digging, Drew is obviously agitated, and screams at each exertion.

The four make a run for it downriver, cutting their trip short, but soon disaster strikes as the canoes reach a dangerous stretch of rapids. After repeated requests by Ed to don his life jacket, an unnerved Drew ignores them without a word of explanation. As Drew and Ed reach the rapids in the lead canoe, Drew shakes his head and falls forward into the river.

After Drew disappears into the river, Ed loses control of his canoe and both canoes collide on the rocks, spilling Lewis, Bobby, and Ed into the river. Lewis breaks his femur and the others are washed ashore alongside him. Encouraged by the badly-injured Lewis, who believes the toothless hillbilly shot Drew and is now stalking them, as well as knowing that they can never survive the rapids at night, Ed climbs a nearby rock face in order to dispatch the suspected shooter using his bow, while Bobby stays behind to look after Lewis. Ed reaches the top and hides out until the next morning, when he sees the man he was looking for standing on the cliff holding a rifle, looking down into the gorge where Lewis and Bobby are hiding.

Ed, a champion archer who earlier lost his nerve while aiming his bow at a deer he was tracking, freezes again in spite of his clear shot and imminent danger. The man notices Ed and raises his rifle to fire. Ed clumsily releases his arrow after the man fires, sending his bullet slamming into the rock just next to Ed. Ed falls to the ground in a panic and accidentally stabs himself with another one of his arrows. The man reaches Ed and starts to shoot him, but collapses, revealing Ed's arrow sticking through him. Ed checks the body and sees he is dead, but then suddenly realizes that the man has a full set of teeth and seems to be the wrong man. He then finds false removable teeth inside of the hillbilly's mouth. Ed lowers the body down the cliff with a rope and climbs down after it. Near the bottom, his rope breaks, and after falling into the river, he meets back with Bobby and Lewis riverside.

Ed and Bobby weigh the dead hillbilly down with stones and drop him into the river. Later, they come upon Drew's grotesquely-contorted corpse, and, after being unable to find any definite gunshot wound, they also weigh it down and sink in the river to ensure that it will never be found.

When they finally reach their destination, the town of Aintry (which will soon be submerged by the dammed river, and is being evacuated), they take the injured Lewis to the hospital while the Sheriff comes to investigate the incident. True to Lewis's predictions, one of the deputies is related to one of the deceased hillbillies and is highly suspicious. The three hastily concoct a cover story for the authorities about Drew's death and disappearance being an accident, lying about their ordeal to Sheriff Bullard (played by author James Dickey) in order to escape a possible double murder charge. The sheriff clearly doesn't believe them, but has no evidence with which to charge them. Later, after thinking it over, he simply tells Ed: "Don't ever do nothin' like this again...Don't come back up here... I'd kinda like to see this town die peaceful," to which Ed readily agrees. The men vow to keep their story a secret for the rest of their lives, which proves to be psychologically burdensome for Ed; in the final scene, he awakes screaming from a nightmare in which a dead man's hand rises from the lake.

[edit] Influence

Widely acclaimed as a landmark picture, the film is noted for the memorable music scene near the beginning that sets the tone for what lies ahead: a trip into unknown and potentially dangerous territory. In the scene, set at a rural gas station, character Drew Ballinger plays the instrumental "Dueling Banjos" on his guitar with a hillbilly youth named Lonnie (implied as being an inbred albino in the novel^{[citation needed]}) who is portrayed by Billy Redden in the film, though a body double actually played the banjo.^[1] The song won the 1974 Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance. The film was selected by the New York Times as one of "The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made", while the viewers of Channel 4 in the United Kingdom voted it #45 in a list of "The 100 Greatest Films". The Characters of NCIS make a few references to the film. The first is in the episode "Ravenous" when Tony (played by Michael Weatherly) says to McGee (Sean Murray) "Don't encourage them. You ever see Deliverance?" When McGee responds no, Tony says "When you do, remember I'm Burt Reynolds and you're Ned Beatty" implying that he fits the role of Lewis and McGee is Bobby. Another earlier reference is in the episode "Caught On Tape", when forensic scientist Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) states that missing footage from a camera that had recorded the "fall" of a Marine was like "an outtake from Deliverance" that showed an old man, who is actually the killer, attacking the deceased and a friend.

[edit] Production

Deliverance was shot in the Tallulah Gorge south of Clayton, Georgia and on the Chattooga River, dividing the states of Georgia and South Carolina. Additional scenes were shot as well in Salem, South Carolina and Sylva, North Carolina. A scene was also shot at the Mount Carmel Baptist Church cemetery, which now lies 300 feet under the surface of Lake Jocassee, South Carolina^[2].

John Boorman's gold record for the "Dueling Banjos" hit single was later stolen from his house by the Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, a scene Boorman recreated in The General (1998), his biographical film about Cahill. In addition to the movie's famous theme, there are also a number of sparse, brooding passages of music scattered throughout, including several played on a synthesizer. Some prints of the movie omit much of this extra music. Other than Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandel's credit for "Dueling Banjos", no one is credited for any of the incidental music.

[edit] Differences from the novel

Although the film closely follows the novel which is written 'in persona', some sections are different. Examples include the character description of Ed (in the novel, Ed was bald and in his late 40s), the missing introduction (explaining why they decided to go on a canoe trip instead of playing golf), and an epilogue after the events. There is also no mention of the infamous 'Squeal like a pig' sentence in the novel. In the film, only Bobby's line of work is mentioned (he is an insurance salesman). The novel additionally reveals that Ed is a graphic designer or art director for an advertising agency, Drew works as a sales representative for a large Atlanta-based soft drink manufacturer (most likely The Coca-Cola Company, though it's not referred to by name), and Lewis is simply an unspecified white-collar worker. The first section of the book describes a day at the office for Ed, which (except for the opening voiceover) is omitted from the movie.

Ned Beatty states that he created the infamous "squeal piggy" line while he and actor Bill McKinney were improvising the scene.^[3] James Dickey's son, Christopher Dickey, in his book, Summer of Deliverance, said that it was one of the crewmen who suggested that Ned Beatty's character, "Bobby", "squeal like a pig" — to add some backwoods horror to the scene and to make it more shocking. According to Boorman's running commentary for the HD DVD and Blu-ray editions, the studio wanted the scene shot two ways, one of which would be acceptable for TV. Boorman didn't want to do this, and as "Squeal like a pig" was a good replacement for the (presumably obscene) dialog in the script, it was substituted, as it would work for both the theatrical and TV versions. (The TV version is so heavily edited that it looks as if Bobby has been merely chased through the woods in his underwear, rather than raped.)

[edit] Awards and nominations

Nominated for:

• Academy Award for Best Picture
• Academy Award for Directing - John Boorman
• Academy Award for Film Editing - Tom Priestley
• New York Film Critics Circle for Best Film and Best Director
• Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama
• Golden Globe Award for Best Director - Motion Picture - John Boorman
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama - Jon Voight
• Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song - Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandel
• Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay - James Dickey

[edit] Cast

• Jon Voight - Ed Gentry
• Burt Reynolds - Lewis Medlock
• Ned Beatty - Bobby Trippe
• Ronny Cox - Drew Ballinger
• James Dickey - Sheriff Bullard
• Billy Redden - Lonnie
• Seamon Glass - First Griner
• Randall Deal - Second Griner
• Bill McKinney - Mountain Man
• Herbert 'Cowboy' Coward - Toothless Man
• Ed O'Neill - Deputy
• Westley Foster - Dancing Inbred

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Deliverance

• Deliverance at the Internet Movie Database
• Deliverance at Allmovie
• Deliverance at the TCM Movie Database
• Weekend in Aintry! James Dickey & The Making of Deliverance
• Pictures of some deleted scenes