Deliverance

Deliverance

I've always wondered why it's called 'Duelling Banjos', given that there's only one banjo. It should be called 'Duelling Stringed Instruments' or 'A Duel Between a Guitar and a Banjo' or 'Duelling Instruments' or, stretching it a bit, 'Duelling Banjo'. But not 'Duelling Banjos'.
It would have been interesting to see what John Boorman could have made of First Blood (the first Rambo film) if he had been given the chance to direct it, and an actor more willing to be unsympathetic than Sylvester Stallone. Apparently the novel on which First Blood is based is much darker than the finished film, and features masses of death and carnage, which Boorman would presumably have presented with a distanced eye. Deliverance came out at the height of America's involvement in Vietnam but, at least to me, doesn't seem like a 'Vietnam film'. Boorman's films presented a conflict more primal than that between opposing groups of people - his protagonists challenge nature itself. Normally, I have to 'pan and scan' the screen grabs so that you can see the thing I am talking about without having to wait ages for the pictures to load. Usually there's no problem in cropping the image, but Deliverance was made before widescreen films were composed for television, and thus most of the pictures here are full-frame so that all the people's heads are in shot. This was Ned Beatty's first film. Apparently he doesn't like to talk about it. Other actors who don't like to talk about some of the films in which they have starred include Harrison Ford, who didn't like Bladerunner due to the fact that his character, a detective, didn't actually do any detecting, and Ed Harris, who found the making of underwater chlorine-fest The Abyss so traumatic that he sometimes broke down in tears after work. Presumably Harvey Keitel doesn't like to talk about Apocalypse Now, because he was sacked from the lead role after a fortnight.
Dating In Hong Kong On FirstClickFriend.Com Offers Online Dating Services And Online Personals For All Regions In Hong Kong. Dating In Hong Kong Can Be Really Successful Ith FirstClickFriend.Com 1. Deliverance came out in 1972, four years before I was born. When I think of the seventies, I tend to think of the period from 1968 to 1977 - roughly coinciding with the gap between Midnight Cowboy and Star Wars. Deliverance is a very 'seventies' movie, but I'll come to that in a minute. The last three years of the seventies seem like a separate decade to me, not quite the seventies and definitely not the eighties. 1977-80 makes me think of disco and punk, the Bee Gees and Gary Numan, a dark period when Tom Baker Doctor Who episodes were genuinely scary and the minute hand on the nuclear clock was getting closer to midnight. For whatever reason, I also think of awful Blake Edwards comedies and Smokey and the Bandit. The late seventies seemed to stand for nothing, perhaps echoing the anonymous nobodies who were in power at the time. Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer who was humiliated by the Ayatollah Khomeini, whereas James Callaghan was... just... there. I can't think of a single famous thing he said or a single thing he did, apart from lose his only election to Margaret Thatcher, who said lots of famous things such as 'it was inside the exclusion zone' and 'where is he? I can hear him but I can't see him'. Same with Jimmy Carter, but then again I'm sure that an American person of my age could probably rattle off entire speeches by the man, as Americans are taught from an early age to take Presidents very seriously indeed, which is probably why so many of them seemed to genuinely believe that Bill Clinton was worse than Hitler. In Italy schoolchildren are made to defecate on portraits of Prime Ministers. But I digress. Deliverance is a very seventies movie. The 80s (1982-1985 and 1986-1989) were all about the glorification of advanced technology, militarism, and consumerism, a decade in which films always had a musical montage in which the lead characters tried on expensive clothes, and at the end the hero advanced one rung up the class ladder which America doesn't have (witness the end of Back to the Future, in which Marty McFly moved from being working-class trailer-trash to being middle-class and owning a large off-roader, or Romancing the Stone, in which our heroine went from being a middle-class novelist to being an upper-middle-class yacht owner. ET, despite being criticised by everybody for being so popular, was actually quite good in this respect). The 90s (1989-1993, 1994-1996, 1997-2000) were a kind of half-hearted backlash against this, and the current decade appears to be a half-hearted backlash against the 90s, although with the distorting effect of the internet which, with its combination of well-off, overeducated, immature white males and freedom from blame, appears to be a breeding-ground for the kind of unpleasant right-wingers who believe that being nice to people is 'politically correct' and therefore wrong. People who like Ayn Rand. People who argue on FuckedCompany that, if you're laid off, it's because you obvious weren't very good, and that if a company fails it was because the workers were lazy. But I digress again. Deliverance is a very seventies movie. It's about four white male friends in their thirties who care, with varying degrees of passion, about the environment. Not a single one of those attributes would appear in a film nowadays. For a start, the group would consist of a white male in his mid-twenties who is the hero, a black male of similar age who is the sidekick, a white or asian woman possibly in her late-teens who is the love interest, and a disposable character, probably latino, probably male, who is there to make jokes and get killed, thus assuring us of the gravity of their predicament. This is because film producers, at heart, want to remove creativity from film-making. They might not realise it, but they do. In the mind of a producer, a film is a Lego(r) set; a bunch of components that, when snapped together in the right order, make money. Which is true, to some extent, and sometimes this approach produces a good film. The Lost World was such a slot-together film and made loads of money, although it wasn't very good. Same with Armageddon, which was at least preposterous enough to be entertaining. Heck, all films are made this way, really, but... Incidentally, I know the feeling myself when I'm adding bits to my website. There's the creative stuff, which is often hard work, unpredictable, and erratic, and there's the 'work bits', stuff like stripping out unwanted spaces and proofing and stuff like that. The latter is easy but boring and can be done on autopilot, and a website made entirely in that way would be like New Media Age or Marketing Week or some other glossy trade magazine - expertly-produced and slick, but with no actual substance of any kind, just a lot of rewritten press releases based, usually, around a skimmed, partisan report, two statistics that agree with each other, and four quotes from 'leading industry figures'. Anybody can be trained to do that. It's what degrees in journalism are for. I'm sure that every art form has people like that, people who, I should imagine, don't realise how much other people hate them - people who probably get genuinely upset when other people question them, because they're insecure. I'm sure that businessmen who think up inventive ways to make money look down on business school graduates who apply the same old rules over and over again, but with minor refinements, and I'm sure that arty photographers look down on the people who work for stock photographic agencies, producing technically-perfect images of businessmen shaking hands. It must be horrible working in American television. ...there has to be somebody to actually make the components in the first place, and when this mix'n'match approach infiltrates the minds of supposedly-creative people it starts to eat away at the quality of films. A good solid 4x2x2 Lego(r) brick is very tough, but if you split it into smaller and smaller Lego(r) bricks it will fall apart the moment it is put under stress. And I'm sure that the person who first thought up the idea of making the hero an ex-cop who is called back for one last job died poor, his idea used endlessly by others. If the creative people were united, they could take over and rule culture. People would get sick of the uncreative people making the same films, and they would flock to productions by the creative people. And then, over time, the creative people would stratify into two groups, one of which would try to reduce the role of the other, and then they would be right back where they started. Haha! Stupid creative people. The mind is less powerful than the loins, and the loins are more easily inflamed by money than they are by clever wordplay. Thing is, though, that approach only works when the bits are suitable together, and of extremely high quality. Talent and creativity are force multipliers, and can extract a better film from less money than the brute force approach of just flinging expensive things together in the hope that they will stick. Of course, the film industry is a business and it's the bottom line that matters, but, just like a paper plane, prefabricated films often don't have any staying power, because they are more easily made obsolete, as the components, like a piece of engineering, can be copied and refined by others, whereas art is unique. They generate revenue in the cinema but die a death on DVD. Good films sell and sell forever, like one of those Mercedes convertibles from the 70s. They'll have a heck of a time selling the 1998 Godzilla in 2015. But Blade Runner will probably still be in print, although as it was set in 2015 itself we'll probably have a good laugh at the 'Atari' logos and wonder how people could stomach to see Harrison Ford without being sick given that... you know, the thing he did... with the thing... that... happened. Mind you, you can't get A Day in the Death of Joe Egg or Can Hieronymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? in the shops any more, and they were both art, although in the latter case not particularly good art. Hey, this kind of 'slow and steady wins the race' thing is very seventies, just like Deliverance, which is a very seventies film, and not at all made up of bits of other films (except maybe Bad Day at Black Rock and the Tarzan movies). Notice how I use '70s' and 'seventies' without any reason or rhyme? Isn't it just so zany? When I think of films from the seventies I think of Westworld and The Poseidon Adventure (and insipid rubbish such as The Morning After winning the 'Best Song' Oscar, which still happens - it's as if the Oscars exist in another world, like the Eurovision song contest (a world where Giorgio Moroder's awful disco score for the 1978 film Midnight Express wins an Oscar, but Vangelis' excellent music for Bladerunner - so good, that people still buy it nowadays - didn't even get a nomination). How did the Eurovision get to be that way? Why don't any proper groups enter? They'd thrash (at least morally) the other songs. Or is Europe really a pop-culture-free zone?), and Silent Running and Airport 1975 (why didn't they call it Airport II? Incidentally, I can't think of a single thing that happened in 1975) and The Parallax View and, if I had seen them, I would also think of Rollerball and All the President's Men and lots of other films where people mumble the dialogue and you can't understand what's going on. Take the definition of the 80s that I wrote a few paragraphs ago, invert it, and you have the impression I get of the 70s through the films of the era. The environmental movement seemed to be quite novel, as did feminism. Films seemed to be much more extreme than they were post-Star Wars, Deliverance being a perfect example. The tone is completely dead-serious from start to finish, without a hint of irony at any point. There are no references to popular culture - like almost every film from the period, it does not take place in 'our world', but in a parallel world where the newspapers, television shows and films are unlike our own. (Mind you, most films take place in their own world. In the world of, say, Mission : Impossible 2, Tom Cruise the film star does not exist, and neither presumably does Mission : Impossible 2. This becomes fascinating when you think of Star Trek, and how terms such as 'phaser' and 'transporter' have entered the language - in the future, if we invent a matter transmitter, we will probably say 'beam me up' because of Star Trek, and thus in a way Star Trek will actually become the future. Trippy, eh?) Deliverance does not have a soundtrack of popular songs. There is absolutely no CGI. The title credits do not a: enter and leave with a 'whoosh' noise; b: type themselves onto the screen a character at a time as if from a remote terminal on a very, very slow connection; c: jitter and skitter and look like bad handwriting; d: go in time with techno music; None of the deaths are treated like throwaway jokes. At no point does the hero casually shoot somebody whilst his jacket billows stylishly. People feel bad about killing other people. That doesn't happen in modern films. In those days, film stars were in their thirties, and some of them were actual proper actors, not wooden clothes-horses like Ethan Hawke or Uma Thurman, although there were probably plenty of them really, it's just that they haven't stood the test of time so I am unaware of them. The two kids from Zabriskie Point, for example. I'm sure that the late-60s equivalent of Empire magazine had two-page 'text on the left, big photo on the right' articles about them, and about how they were going to be big stars. And I suppose that Robert Redford was treated just like that when he started. I was going to say how the scene, always edited for television, where Ned Beatty... you know... wouldn't happen in a supposedly-mainstream action film today. But apparently Bridget Jones' Diary has a scene involving anal sex. But then again Jones' is a comedy, and you can get away with a lot in a comedy. And action films do not generally have much sex in them, at least not the American variety of action movies. 1. John Boorman. I considered leaving this entry as just 'John Boorman', in the same way that one of the credits in an old Robert Fripp album, instead of being 'Brian Eno - Electronics' was just 'Eno - Eno', i.e. he was beyond description. John Boorman is a bit like Stanley Kubrick, but more of a hippy. Kubrick was reclusive and his films often gave the impression that he had a dim view of all of humanity. Boorman, on the other hand, is quite open in interviews (he used to be almost a parody of the over-analytical film student, in that he was the kind of person who would use the words 'linear' and 'ambiguous' without blinking, but is now a lot grumpier), and his films usually had some sympathetic people, quite often those who were 'closest to nature', although his human actors were often archetypes, put there to represent a segment of humanity (most obviously in Zardoz, where everybody was 'The something', i.e. 'The brutals' and 'The apathetics' and 'The immortals' and so on), or indeed humanity itself. But in other respects they are similar. Both had an initial prolific period encompassing some very good films and some very bad films, some of which were extremely popular, both eventually became more famous than their films which, as time went by, made less and less money, and both were slowed down by their reputations which, nonetheless, allowed them to make films. In the case of Kubrick, an impossible quest for some kind of perfection resulted in a series of movies - after A Clockwork Orange, they took roughly seven years to make - which were made up of individually-polished components that didn't amount to their sum. Nonetheless, Kubrick's films were never truly bad, unlike, say, John Boorman's infamous Exorcist 2 : The Heretic. Whereas Kubrick wisely kept his films ambiguous enough so that we, the audience, couldn't tell what he was trying to do and therefore we couldn't tell how successful he was, Boorman seemed to wear his heart on his sleeve. I mean, there's no way of knowing whether Kubrick wanted Full Metal Jacket to be so artificial and sterile - if he wanted us to actually care about the people in the film, he failed and the film is dreadful. But we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was trying to make a point about dehumanisation, and we laugh at some of the funny lines, secretly wish we could be R. Lee Ermy, and fast-forward through most of the second half, stopping sometimes to look at the pretty way he got all the tanks and people to act in synch with the camera's movements, as if he was filming a ballet. But then again, even if Full Metal Jacket was precisely what Kubrick wanted, that still doesn't mean it was any good. By being so open about his films, Boorman set himself up for two layers of criticism - is this film successful, and is it any good? Exorcist 2 was supposed to be an exploration of the power of myth wrapped up in the body of a horror film, but we could tell that it wasn't doing so very well, and worst of all it didn't have the saving grace of being scary. Same with The Emerald Forest. As a heartfelt advocation of a simpler age it was undoubtedly sincere, and people in the audience might have been entranced by the thought of constantly having sex with nubile women in the jungle, but as something to watch and like it just seemed a bit dull. Whether it's better to be enigmatic and insulated or passionate and vulnerable is a matter for personal taste. Both arguments have merit. The former approach is more feminine and manipulative, relying on the reactions of others, whereas the latter is more forceful and masculine. The women in Boorman's films were often strong and resourceful, which suggests his masculine awe of femininity, whereas Kubrick, whose films featured subservient, weak women, seemed to be jealous of their power, like an unattractive girl lost and ignored in a crowd of gorgeous models. I suspect rejection at the senior prom inspired him, Carrie-like, to exact his revenge upon malekind, which is probably why his films have so many dead men, sometimes killed by women who nonetheless meet sticky ends themselves, whether they're the sniper in Full Metal Jacket, or the womb-like sleeping pods in 2001, or Vera Lynne from Dr Strangelove. Deliverance, like The Great Escape, features no obvious female main characters. But that is to ignore the film's star - the river itself. The river slowly carves its way into a mountain, an invisible touch that slowly reaches in and carves her way into the heart of a man, flattening out the landscape with a power that, although easy to overlook, is nonetheless irresistible (at one point, Burt Reynolds' character states that 'You don't beat the river'). The dam which will transform the river in a lake is presumably a metaphor for the social conventions which force women to wear restrictive clothes in order to reinforce the power of men. Boorman was also sunk by his wildly erratic output, and ultimately his inner struggle to reconcile his own notions of art with crowd-pleasing cinema, something Roger Ebert encapsulated in his observation that The Emerald Forest 'begins as a breathtaking fable and ends as a routine action movie'. Both directors produced a snappy, low-budget classic that was unlike their later work (Point Blank and Dr Strangelove), and both produced a perfect film (Deliverance and 2001) which would allow them to do something slightly unusual (Zardoz and A Clockwork Orange). Nowadays Kubrick has the greater reputation, especially on the internet. Presumably this is because 2001 is popular amongst sci-fi fans and the majority of people - proper people, not the people who just buy clothes - on the internet are sci-fi fans. And he's American. 1. Burt Reynolds. Again, what can be said? At no point during Deliverance did I think of At Long Last Love or those adverts for glasses. In the film he's fantastic (or 'extremely well-cast', the two things are very similar), coming across as a slightly potty, cocky action man, a more intense Han Solo in a nastier world. He seems in pretty good shape, and gets to strike cool poses with a compound bow. Shortly after Deliverance he became one of the biggest movie stars of the 70s, thanks in part to a nude spread in Playgirl, and he even made moustaches seem manly. Rather like Paul Hogan and his advocacy of Australia, Reynolds became a publicist for the southern half of America. I do not know why he chose to do this. I have nothing against the southern half of America. I just cannot understand how someone can devote his career to making part of a landmass seem attractive, via the medium of car chases.
Burt Reynolds wears a wetsuit throughout the film. I've never worn a wetsuit. They look as if they'd be hot and sticky unless you have the physique of Burt Reynolds and can walk around with it hanging open all the time. On the right, Ronny Cox has a guitar and a story to tell. He also has a jacket just like mine, and his hair isn't too dissimilar either. But he's thin and I'm not. If I was thin I could be a film star just like him. I can't play a guitar, but neither can Ronny Cox - he mimes. Some films don't work very well on the small screen. Deliverance is one of them, and gets butchered in pan & scan. If you focus on Ned Beatty and crop this image for television it becomes a symphony of villainous noses.
7. Jon Voight - groovy name - is also in Deliverance. He was in Midnight Cowboy immediately beforehand and won an Oscar nomination. Looking at his filmography on the IMDB, these two films appear to be the high point of his career. His last memorable role was in Anaconda, as a villain with a comical leer. Gene Hackman won an Oscar for The French Connection the year before Deliverance. I bet he's laughing his head off nowadays, given that he's still working in major films, whereas all the other stars who must have seemed more promising have all fallen away. Roy Schieder, his co-star from that film, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern, Richard Dreyfuss - all these people probably had more fans and got to go out with beautiful women all the time, but Gene Hackman, mean-looking Gene Hackman with his lined face and curly hair and serious disposition, outlasted them all. 1. Ronny Cox is in Deliverance - he's the man with the guitar who [spoiler] doesn't make it [/spoiler]. In my mind Ronny Cox is Dick Jones from Robocop. 'I made a mistake. Now it's time to erase that mistake.' He was the villain in Total Recall, too, but I never liked Total Recall. The only other thing I can think of that had Ronny Cox in was Cop Rock, a short-lived American television musical cop show that makes people go 'What, really?' when you tell them that there was once a musical cop show on television in America. And he was in a film called Shirts / Skins which is apparently a bit like Deliverance but I haven't seen it. Anyway, I find it hard to reconcile the villain from Robocop with a smiling guitar-player. He [spoiler] dies [/spoiler] in both films, and indeed in Total Recall as well. It must be hard explaining that to your kids, although it's presumably good practise for when it happens for real. 5. All four major characters represent the four facets of man, or something (probably). In that respect the film is a bit like Fight Club, but with a river and some hillbillies and Ronny Cox as a smiling guitar player. Wasn't there a bit in Sleepless in Seattle where Tom Hanks defines The Dirty Dozen as the ultimate 'guy movie'? I haven't seen it, but I assume Deliverance was on the shortlist. It's very manly. That and Penthouse's 1991 Pet of the Year Play-Off & 1992 Winners, although I assume that the latter is not a proper movie. Ronny Cox is the archetypal 'cave painter' (he plays an acoustic guitar and smiles a lot), the kind of person who, back in caveman days, would probably have attempted foreplay and made a token effort at conversation after the act, but then again I would say that as I am a creative type myself. It's odd - and not entirely pleasant - to think of Ronny Cox in a sexual sense. Ned Beatty is supposed to be the 'consumer', in that he's out of shape, whereas Burt Reynolds is obviously the 'Iron John' type who would have gone out to get killed by rampaging boar, before being made obsolete by the 'family man', who presumably is represented by Jon Voight. Voight is the one we identify with - and like many heroes he doesn't really have a defining trait, he's an everyman. 9. Deliverance has possibly the first modern 'shock ending' of a Hollywood film, four years before Carrie. In both cases, the ending is a dream and involves a hand, and the villain doesn't really come back. The last-minute twist was used to good effect in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, two years later. 9. Apparently the banjo is one of the hardest instruments to play well. I assume this is because when you pluck a string on a banjo it goes 'dink' and doesn't sustain like a guitar, so you have to play lots of notes very quickly. I should imagine it's similar in that respect to a clavinet, and it's odd that, whereas the latter is synonymous with funk, the banjo has not yet had a starring role on a Stevie Wonder album. Apparently the oboe is also hard to master. 7. I don't know why, but the film is presented in a box in the middle of the screen, i.e. there's a border all the way around the picture, not just the top and bottom, but the sides as well. Unless there's a really good technical reason, why didn't they just enlarge the picture so that it reached the sides of the frame, thus increasing the apparent resolution and making it easier to see? On the other hand, it's nice to know that we're getting the full picture. With traditional widescreen DVDs you can never be sure that there isn't something hidden right at the edges. But not here.
This section contains two examples of smiles that are slightly wrong. Here we see Ronny Cox going downriver in a boat and enjoying it slightly too much. Damn, the captions I could write for this. Along with Scorpio from Dirty Harry this guy is one of the nastiest villains from 70s films, despite the fact that he only gets a few minutes of screen time.
6. Deliverance preceded two popular 70s genres - the 'man versus nature' film (although Jaws is a more obvious point of origin), and the 'you ain't from around these parts, are ya'boy?' film, such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or the more recent Blair Witch Project. And, for that matter, the vigilante revenge film, rape optional. Not to mention the 'bunch of friends try to cover up a heinous act which they have perpetrated, and one of them is seems to be enjoying it a bit too much' film, such as A Simple Plan or Very Bad Things or, in a backwards way, All the President's Men. Which just goes to show how few ideas there are in Hollywood, and how hard it is for somebody with an original idea to actually make it into a film without somebody else hearing about it and making a cheap copy. Other popular 70s genres include the disaster film, the stuntman film (such as Burt Reynolds' own Hooper), the deadly serious mainstream adult thriller (the most recent of which was The Insider, but you'd have to wrack your brains for another one, given that almost all films are aimed at 12-25 year olds) and the 'trained rats' film. 3. One of the plot points involves the demise of Ronny Cox's character. Immediately after burying the dead mountain man, Cox's character seems to have a breakdown (his reaction to the rape is more emotive than that of Ned Beatty's character), and falls into the river. Burt Reynolds' character maintains that Cox's character was shot - it's one of those mysteries that doesn't work on video / DVD, because you can rewind the film to reveal that he wasn't shot at all. Although it's not all that easy to tell, because it could just be that they didn't have the budget to show bullet wounds. 7. Although the main plot strand is about our heroes running from some hillbillies, they don't actually interact with the villains very much at all. Essentially, after Burt Reynolds' character shoots the rapist, his accomplice runs off. Jon Voight shoots a passing strange who appears to be the escapee, and that's it. It's always puzzled me as to whether this passing stranger was the second assailant or not. We never really get a good look at his face. The second assailant had a baseball cap and no upper front teeth, whereas the passing stranger does not wear a cap but also has no upper front teeth, but he wears dentures and we see earlier on in the film that bad teeth are common in these parts. The facial hair seems to match, though. And it does seem odd that he would be wandering around what is apparently a wilderness (based on the appraisal of the local population at the beginning of the film) with a hunting rifle. But, then again, we learn later on that Ronny Cox's character might not have been shot at all, in which case the ownership of a hunting rifle does not count against the hillbilly. And as for the area being a wilderness, we see a deer earlier on, and it could have been that the locals were just trying to scare our heroes. Later on, there's a suggestion that the man Jon Voight killed might have been the brother-in-law of one of the local sheriffs, but even if he was, this doesn't mean that he wasn't the second assailant. All this takes up about fifteen minutes of screen time with very little dialogue - Oliver Stone should be forced to watch this film. The cast list has Herbert "Cowboy" Coward playing 'toothless man', and no separate listing for another hillbilly, but that's not conclusive. 1b. Television showings cut out the swearing, too. There isn't a great deal, just a few f-words, presumably heady stuff for 1972. 3. Cleverly, there isn't much music. Most of the film consists of dialogue and environmental noises, despite which there was a 'soundtrack album' which actually consisted of 'Duelling Banjos'-esque folk music and got to number one in the American charts (I think). In total, there's 'Duelling Banjos' played about four times at various speeds and in various keys, some ambient sound effects during the bit where Jon Voight throws stuff off a cliff, and some dated-sounding electric piano music at the end. It's just on the boundary between having no music track at all (like Catch 22 or All the President's Men) and just being very spartan (such as Assault on Precinct 13, which, as far as I remember, consisted of only three pieces of music played at different times). 6. The bit with Ned Beatty that they cut from television (yes, that bit) is one of those 'chest-bursting scene from Alien' moments, but extended and slowed-down. I can imagine audiences in 1972 finding it hard to eat their popcorn. Although he's overweight, Ned Beatty is in fairly good shape. Given that this is the sole mainstream Hollywood film to feature a man being raped (unless you count that one that had Richard Crenna in it, but that was a television film), his performance during and after the act is extremely effective. Whoever won the 'Best Actor' Oscar for 1972 didn't deserve it.* Like the rest of the film, it's presented in a very matter-of-fact way, medium-shot, voices mixed down low on the soundtrack. Immediately afterwards the chief villain is shot with an arrow, and has a lengthy death sequence which is almost as disturbing - the complete lack of sensationalism seems jarring after the 80s. * It was, in fact, Marlon Brando for The Godfather. And he didn't even want it.
Jon Voight has the darndest neck I've ever seen. It makes him look a bit like ET. Voight was nominated for an Oscar for Midnight Cowboy but didn't win. Nonetheless, his genes did, eventually, because he's the father of Angelina Jolie, who won an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted. Appearance-wise, Voight didn't age very well. By the 80s who looked a bit mad, and he had a 'spiritual awakening' at the end of the decade. Here, Burt Reynolds prepares to shoot the fish in the very last image on this page. He doesn't miss. I should imagine that sales of compound bows went up after Deliverance. That and diving watches. At the beginning our heroes drive around in what appears to be a primitive 'sports-ute', a small Land Rover-esque vehicle that seems plusher than a contemporary Land Rover. In those days people in America drove around in station wagons and saloons, whereas nowadays everybody has a truck. Deliverance hasn't dated all that badly, despite coming out in a notoriously ephemeral period. Most of the clothing and props are purely functional, and it takes place largely in the wilderness. The music is pre-dated, and the cinematography and editing do not go out of their way to be novel. There isn't any split-screen, for example.
4. Deliverance apparently cost less than two million dollars. I don't know what that means in 1972 film-making money. It doesn't sound like a lot. Star Wars cost ten million dollars, but that was 1977 and I don't know what ten million dollars meant in 1977 film-making money either. 2001 also cost ten million dollars but that was 1968. It was considered quite expensive. So allowing for inflation, let's say that Deliverance cost roughly a quarter of a 'quite expensive' film. Nowadays, $100 million is 'quite expensive'. So Deliverance cost about $25 million in today's money, which is a lot more than a low-budget direct-to-video film, but very low for a proper feature that isn't a comedy. The budget doesn't really show, apart from one sequence where Jon Voight's character climbs a cliff at night, and you can tell that it was done day-for-night. The film is consistently good to look at and the few bloody effects look real. When I say 'Jon Voight's character climbs a cliff' I should apparently say 'Jon Voight climbs a cliff', as there were apparently no stuntmen. Presumably, however, Boorman used filmic tricks so that Voight wasn't put in any danger - we don't actually see any long-shots of him clambering up the cliff, and it could be that he was lowered into place and told to hang on and look athletic (that's how I would have done it, anyway). At the time, none of the cast were particularly famous - Jon Voight had an Oscar nomination for Midnight Cowboy, but that was about it. It was also apparently shot in sequence, in that they filmed it in the same order as the script (instead of, as is more common, filming all the scenes in one particular location at the same time). This makes sense, as I don't think the characters ever actually return to a location, and the film is completely linear, going from point A to point B without any diversions or sub-plots. 7. Another '70s' thing the film does is end ambiguously. That doesn't happen any more. The sheriff that our surviving heroes meet at the end of the film may or may not suspect them of foul play - or it might just be that he doesn't like them very much - and even if he does it might be that he can guess what happened, and is prepared to let them go, and we never find out if they are found out. There certainly seem to be enough variables for them to worry about - they don't bury the first assailant's body particularly well, something which Jon Voight's climactic dream vividly demonstrates, and if Ronny Cox's character actually was shot, and the body turns up with a bullet inside it (or, even more simply, if it turns up tied to a rock, which is how they 'bury' him) they'll be in a lot of trouble. Nowadays there would be a gunfight at the end and all the characters would be killed. 9. Deliverance is an extremely good film that is very hard to categorise. It isn't really an action film, as there isn't much action. It's more of a horror film, in that it gets under your skin and makes you worried, but it reminds me more of Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout than Dracula AD 1972. In the end, though, the semi-documentary approach means that it's not really much of a '[blank] film' at all. It just is. The pacing and structure are unlike modern Hollywood films. The plot is set up during the first few minutes, after which the film divides into three acts, each roughly thirty minutes long. In the first act, our heroes boat down the river; in the second, they fight for survival; and in the third, the survivors cover their tracks. Essentially, the film consists of a build-up, an action bit, and an epilogue - there are probably posher words that make more sense, but you get the meaning. Compare this with a modern action film such as, Die Hard, which is as good an example of a modern action film as anyone could want, despite it being almost fifteen years old. The structure is essentially the same, but nowadays the epilogue is shortened to almost nothingness, and each act usually has at least one action sequence, with the longest being in the middle and at the end (although Die Hard didn't have an action sequence at the very beginning of the film, most of its imitators did). What does this prove? Not much. The Die Hard model is essentially that of the James Bond films, and Deliverance was probably as unusual in 1972 as it is today.
Ronny Cox from Robocop, where he played the villainous Dick Jones so effectively that I find it hard to reconcile the above image with the thought of Ronny Cox. The river looks extremely dirty and not at all nice, a bit like the Mersey, but with hordes of uncivilised hillbillies instead of scousers. This fish was harmed during the making of this motion picture.

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