Produced and directed by John Boorman;
Written by James Dickey, based on his novel; director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond; edited by Tom Priestley; released by Warner Brothers.
Running time: 109 minutes.
Year: 1972
With: Jon Voight (Ed), Burt Reynolds (Lewis), Ned Beatty (Bobby), Ronny Cox (Drew), Billy McKinney (Mountain Man), Herbert Coward (Toothless Man), James Dickey (Sheriff Bullard), Ed Ramey (Old Man), and Billy Redden (Lonny).
James Dickey, who won the 1965 National Book Award for poetry and published his first novel, Deliverance, in 1970, has been described as a poet "concerned primarily with the direct impact of experience."
In Deliverance, he attempts to describe the direct impact of the experience of four Atlanta suburbanites�three of whom are less fit for hiking across a steep cornfield than for watching televised football�when they go on a weekend canoe trip that turns into a nightmare of the machismo mind.
Survival, says one of the characters helpfully (at least helpfully for those of us who suffer genetic deficiencies), is the name of the game. Together the members of the party shoot the white water and, individually, are assaulted by a couple of sodomy-inclined hillbillies, scale sheer cliffs using nothing more than what seem to be prehensile fingernails, and fight death duels armed with bow-and-arrow before eventually finding their�well�deliverance.
The problem with the novel is that the perfectly legitimate excitement of the tall story is neutralized by a kind of prose that only Irving Wallace might envy (i.e., "She had great hands; they knew me"). Ordinarily, a film is much better suited than a novel for communicating the direct impact of experience, if only because the experience is immediate and unintellectualized, and you don't have to climb over picturesque semicolons to get from one statement of fact to another.
However, so many of Dickey's lumpy narrative ideas remain in his screenplay that John Boorman's screen version becomes a lot less interesting than it has any right to be. Deliverance, which opened yesterday at Loew's Tower East, is an action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words on the order of: "Sometimes you gotta lose yourself to find something." If anybody said that to me�seriously�in the course of a canoe trip I think I'd get out and wade.
This is a disappointment because the film contains some good things, including the look of the production, which was photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, who did McCabe and Mrs. Miller, entirely on locations in rural Georgia in a kind of bleached color that denies any thoughts of romantic sentimentality. The white water sequences are smashingly vivid and untricky, as is Boorman's treatment of his characters who, much of the time, are kept in a middle distance�one that precludes a phony intimacy with them�until crucial moments when close-ups are necessary.
Best of all are the performances�by Jon Voight, as the thoughtful, self-satisfied businessman who rather surprisingly meets the challenge of the wilderness; Burt Reynolds, as the Hemingway hero who fails, through no real fault of his own, and Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox, as their two city friends whose total unsuitability for such a weekend venture is just one of a number of unbelievable and unexplained points in the Dickey screenplay. I wouldn't get into a Central Park rowboat with either one, but then Dickey's story is schematic, and to make his points about the nature of man he had to deny the very realism that the film pretends to deal in.
James Dickey's "Deliverance" is the story of a "worst journey." Four city slickers from Atlanta decide to take a canoe trip down a river that will soon be flooded out to make a lake.
One of the four is big on the old machismo. The other three, to various degrees, are unsuited to make the journey. Before their trip is over, one of them is dead, one has been raped by a demented hillbilly and the other two have each killed a hillbilly with a bow and arrow.
Dickey, who wrote the original novel and the screenplay, lards this plot with a lot of significance -- universal, local, whatever happens to be on the market. He is clearly under the impression that he is telling us something about the nature of man, and particularly civilized man's ability to survive primitive challenges ("Survival," the macho Burt Reynolds character tells us, "is the name of the game")
But I don't think it works that way. The movie is admittedly effective on the level of simple adventure. Director John Boorman and his cameraman, Vilmos Zsigmond, get some tremendously good (and unfaked) footage of the foursome shooting some fairly hairy rapids.
The scenes of violence and rape also work, it must be admitted, although in a disgusting way. The appeal to latent sadism is so crudely made that the audience is embarrassed.
As sometimes happens, however, the performances have a validity that transcends the film; Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds and, indeed, all the members of the cast are finely tuned and very good.
What the movie totally fails at, however, is its attempt to make some kind of significant statement about its action. For all of his 6 feet 4 inches and prowess with a bow and arrow, what James Dickey has given us here is a fantasy about violence, not a realistic consideration of it.
The adventures that occur in the film belong in Freudian dreams, and many of the exploits (particularly Voight's scaling of a cliff) are so incredible that we are back in a James Bond universe.
It's possible to consider civilized men in a confrontation with the wilderness without throwing in rapes, cowboy-and-Indian stunts and pure exploitative sensationalism. That's why I was reminded of "The Worst Journey in the World," I suppose. It makes Dickey's odyssey seem absolutely adolescent.