Deliverance

UK Release Date. 28 September 1972
Certification. 18
Running Time. 1 hour 49 mins
Director. John Boorman
Cast. Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight.
Rating. 73%

Review.

Following widespread critical acclaim for the visually elegant Point Blank and Hell In The Pacific, English filmmaker John Boorman brought James Dickey's best-selling novel, Deliverance, to the big screen. Boorman was rewarded with three nominations at the 1973 Academy Awards, including one for Best Director and one for Best Picture.

Four Atlanta businessmen - Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds), Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox) and Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty) - set off to canoe down the remote Cahulawassee River before the valley is flooded by a dam under construction.

The four men's weekend escape swiftly descends into a nightmare, their camaraderie and morality tested to the limit by nature's brutality and grotesque, human savagery.

Deliverance’s pivot from ‘buddy film’ into backwoods horror is deeply haunting – unsurprising though it is, given the air of menace choking the film from the outset. The film afforded Boorman a violent, elemental platform to explore what was a long-time interest in nature and traditional notions of heroism. While Voight’s mild-mannered Ed ultimately proves himself against the woodsmen who terrorise the group, Reynolds’ all-action outdoorsman Lewis finds himself as much at the mercy of the wilderness as his ill-prepared friends.

Famously, or infamously, the tone all turns on an act that until then scarcely dropped into pop culture, let alone cinema screens. In comparison to contemporary films like Straw Dogs, The Last House On The Left and I Spit On Your Grave, which routinely focused on the psychological torture and rape of women, Deliverance brought male rape to the fore in an extraordinary scene that unsettled many. Those who saw it first in some darkened movie theatre, with other cinema-goers shared a communal experience. Especially the males attending who didn’t know what lay ahead in one of the most noteworthy scenes of the decade.

Deliverance remains paradoxically both John Boorman’s most popular film and perhaps his toughest to watch. What sets off as a cinematic exploration of man versus the wild, slowly peels away civilisation's veneer to reveal primeval instincts beneath. The film is at its most interesting when confronting issues of modern masculinity, with the naive, suburban day-trippers turning up to the wilderness full of confidence only to discover that they’ve bitten off far, far more than they can chew. Quietly observational, Boorman’s wire-taut approach delivers a nightmare that lingers. The strength of the harrowing, gut-wrenching experience that is Deliverance, is that even after fifty years, we continue to talk about it.