. The first is the tuneful bluegrass plink of Arthur Smith’s Dueling Banjos, performed by the eponymous instrument and an acoustic guitar harmonizing with it. The second, much less pleasant sound is the high, pained yelp of Ned Beatty, squealing like a pig to appease the depraved stranger violating him.
Written by James Dickey, faithfully adapting his own 1970 novel, Deliverance quickly, cleanly lays out its trajectory through the ventricles of a heart of darkness. Gathering for some old-fashioned male bonding by way of wilderness adventure are four businessmen from Atlanta: the self-aggrandizing macho bully Lewis , thoughtful strummer Drew , good-sport accountant Bobby , and level-headed audience surrogate Ed .
You could call Deliverance the “reputable”, mainstream cousin to contemporaneous classics of deep-south-west mayhem like The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Boorman’s backwoods bogeymen aren’t quite as inhuman as the cannibalistic redneck monsters of those movies, but they’re still ghoulish caricatures, fulfilling the quintessential stereotype of the rural south as an enclave of toothless, depraved cousin-fuckers.
This was, of course, the film that made Reynolds a movie star. Which makes sense, as he’s downright iconic in the role, a magnetically obnoxious cowboy blowhard. Boorman basks in his rugged sex appeal but also slyly subverts it, both in emphasizing Lewis’s brutish cruelty and in eventually reducing him to a mewling shell of himself, all his machismo drained out of him by a gnarly fracture of the femur.
Could Burt Reynolds look any more macho
Brilliant film. Complex moral tale, super suspenseful, and a technical achievement of the time.
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