‘It seems to me that I am the bearer of some kind of immortal message to humankind.’ That was what the author James L. Dickey wrote in his diary during the filming of Deliverance.
Dickey, an American brawling poet and rangy from the American south, was often drunk. Anything he said needs to be taken seriously. Indeed, the story goes that he liked to wander around muttering: ‘Oh, I’m so big! I’m so damned big!’
He at least was telling the truth, literally speaking (6ft3in), and metaphorically. Deliverance, which was based on the writer’s 1970 bestselling debut novel, really was big — despite or because of the scandal it provoked.
Released 50 years ago this month, it’s one of those films that, once seen, is hard to forget. Similar to Lord Of The Flies it shows the horrendous things that humans can do when their survival is threatened.
Deliverance, set in Georgia’s south-central state tells of Lewis (played here by Burt Reynolds), who travels with his friends Ed (Jon Voight), Bobby (“Ned Beatty”) and Drew (“Ronny Cox”) down the river on a canoe ride before the floods and destruction of its rapids by the construction of a hydroelectric dam.
From the start, there is an uneasy, unspoken tension between the visiting ‘city boys’ and the local ‘rednecks’. In one of the film’s iconic early scenes, Drew, with his guitar, challenges a boy with a banjo to a musical duel (the resulting Bluegrass number later spent four weeks at No 2 in the Billboard chart). Drew offers to shake his hand, but the boy refuses.
River Trip of Horror: The City Boys (from left to right, Jon Voight and Ronny Beatty, Ned Beatty, Burt Reynolds, and Ned Beatty) along with dead Redneck Rapist Billy McKinney
When the adventure begins, it becomes a nightmare. Drew and Bobby find themselves confronted downriver by two shotgun-wielding locals. Bobby is made to undress and in a scene infamous in cinematic history, he is raped by one of the rednecks who demands that he ‘squeal like a pig’.
Lewis (Reynolds), bursts through the undergrowth to kill the rapist using a bow-and-arrow. The rapist’s companion escapes and the four friends decide to bury the body and continue on their way — but it looks as if the surviving redneck is in pursuit, determined to exact revenge.
The violence portrayed in the film — and above all that lengthy scene of male rape — shocked cinemagoers and critics alike. Rural folk in Georgia were outraged by their portrayal as ‘inbred sex offenders’.
Roger Ebert, a famed American critic, said that the film is exploitative sensationalism. ‘The appeal to latent sadism is so crudely made that the audience is embarrassed,’ he pronounced.
Nevertheless, it made millions at the box office, was nominated for three Oscars in 1973 and is now seen as a classic: selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry for being ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’.
Yet given the film’s turbulent production history, the real miracle is that it ever got made at all.
James Dickey, convinced that he was helping and determined to maintain control, interfered repeatedly. ‘I have a good director, though an Englishman,’ he wrote warily to a friend.
John Boorman, an Englishman, chose to trim the 19 first pages of Dickey’s screen adaptation because it was too slow for the river trip.
Big Jim Dickey, drunk in his favourite watering hole, told anyone would listen: ‘God, they’re ruining my f***ing movie, ain’t they? They’re not doing my book.’ Finally, in a rage, he attacked the director, who was seven inches shorter than him. He also broke four of his front teeth.
Yet amazingly, it wasn’t this that persuaded Boorman to kick Dickey off the set. The author started bothering actors.
According to actor Ronny Cox’s brilliant memoir, Duelling Banjos, Dickey took a particular liking to him after watching him shoot a scene. Hammered on whisky in a bar, he bellowed at Cox: ‘Drew! Hey, Drew!’ — he addressed all the actors by their character names as a mark of ownership — ‘Do that scene for us!’
Cox, feeling self-conscious about his actions, refused to do so. Boorman was shocked to learn about it and expelled Cox from his set. Dickey responded to this with an amazing one-hour tirade in which he assumed each character of his book.
He was first the manly, macho Lewis. Next, he was Ed, who became the thoughtful one. Bobby was the clown. Drew ended up being the tender, poetic Drew. After he finished, Drew declared that he would leave if each actor asked.
Reynolds, Voight, and Beatty all did it diplomatically. But when it came to Cox, he couldn’t: tears in his eyes, he said nothing.
Finally Dickey left in disgust and buttonholed Cox, saying: ‘Drew, I am so disappointed you didn’t have the guts to tell those guys that you needed me.’ He didn’t realise Cox wanted him gone most of all.
Voight (left), and Beatty fighting the rapids
Director and actors had the freedom to direct the movie. Boorman initially tried to get Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando as Lewis and Ed. But they were too costly. Other options were Charlton Heston, Donald Sutherland and Robert Redford (who turned down the script because it was too violent).
Boorman made it a point to use relative strangers later. Voight — the father of Angelina Jolie — had appeared in the hit film Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman, but Reynolds was known largely for TV work and had been spotted by Boorman on a chat show.
‘It’s the first time I haven’t had a script with Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s fingerprints all over it,’ Reynolds joked later. ‘The producers actually came to me first.’
Others were actors on stage.
Boorman stated that the advantage to not having big stars was that the audience was unsure who might be killed in the movie.
The shoot was not without its challenges. The rapids of Georgia’s Chattooga River, where the film was shot, were dangerous, and the actors on what was a low-budget, uninsured production were obliged to do their own stunts.
Boorman showed the way and one actor refused to go in the boat.
‘It’s very simple!’ the director declared. Voight later said that he grabbed an oar and jumped into the boat before setting off. The cast was now determined to face the rapids.
Cox was almost about to fall over the waterfall when he fell into the water. A crew member was there to rescue him. Beatty sank to the bottom and said his last thought, before being pulled out, was: ‘I hope they find someone else to finish the scene.’
Voight is required to scale a mountain to stop the killer stalker in another important scene. Voight nearly lost his grip, and almost died.
Reynolds spends a lot of time wearing a rubber vest to display his biceps. He was warned before he filmed a scene where he crosses a waterfall. The current would pull him down. It would make him lose everything.
Reynolds followed the instructions. Reynolds did as instructed. He fell on a rock, sustaining a serious back injury that would continue to plague him throughout his life. Additionally, the strong current whipped him again, so that his clothes were ripped off his body.
‘[The crew] didn’t tell me that it would shoot me like a submarine torpedo!’ Reynolds later remembered. ‘They couldn’t find me for five minutes. A mile downstream, the men saw a naked man coming towards them. I’d had on these high boots and they were gone. They were gone. Underwear was also gone. The jacket was gone.’
Turbulent: James Dickey (right) with Reynolds
Boorman drew inspiration from his local area to create the characters of the rural backwoods. Billy Redden was the boy banjo-player who was found at school. The actor playing the rapper, Billy McKinney took the Method approach to intimidate his victim Beatty off camera. He would sit three tables back, staring at Beatty as he dined.
The movie is both incredibly realistic and grim due to the combination of seat-of-the pants filming and gritty reality. However, Deliverance is much more than just a story about survival. America was involved in Vietnam War at the time Deliverance was created. The dissection of violence and machismo couldn’t help but be read in that context.
The simple story triggered the same anxieties as Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness: it reinforced the message that we are all only a heartbeat away from reversing our evolutionary story and reverting to the brutality of animals.
Even though America continues to pick through cultural and political remnants of the January 2021 Capitol riots, the message is as pertinent and timely as ever.
Deliverance is also very current because of its environmental theme.
‘They’re drowning the river, man,’ Lewis drawls at the start of the film, referring to the building of the hydroelectric dam. ‘Just about the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unfucked-up river in the South . . . They’re gonna rape this whole landscape.’
In the event, of course, it’s the interlopers from the city who get ‘raped’. It’s as if the river itself, served by the mountain men who live around it, is taking a pre-emptive revenge for the sacrilege it knows is going to be perpetrated upon it.
An action film becomes a psychological thriller, and then a horror movie. And, as in other horror films, the punch resides in the fact the thing that is conventionally thought of as benign — the mother, the child, the clown, or in this case, the river — is revealed to be the threat.
Even big James Dickey had to admit that the movie was very good when he finally saw it. Following the escape of his friends, Dickey was permitted to appear on set again as the sheriff dealing with the aftermath.
The author gifted the cast members with a variety of gifts to show they were not in any way bitter. Beatty, Voight and Reynolds received Bowie knives. Drew was hurt and felt betrayed. Dickey only gave Drew a pocket knife. He couldn’t quite let go of the grudge.
When the film was finally released, the writer was incredibly proud. His son Christopher recalls how his father, who was stout of alcohol, had walked up and down queues outside of cinemas.
‘You see that?’ he would say. ‘That’s my movie.’
Time magazine lists Deliverance as one of 20 best novels. Dickey has never written another novel as great.
An unexpected consequence of the film’s success was that city-dwellers came in droves to the backwoods of Georgia, often with little experience of white-water rafting, and took to canoes to try to recreate some of the feats performed in the movie.
Others died from hypothermia or their skulls being blasted against rocks. Locals dubbed this ‘Deliverance Syndrome’.
Cox and Beatty were instantly recognized as actors in film by the success of this film. It confirmed Voight’s chameleonic ability to play a range of different roles. It was also transformative for Burt Reynolds.
He was portrayed as an macho man in this video, but he is also a charismatic actor who can play the right part. Later that year, he was crowned Cosmopolitan magazine’s first male nude centrefold, and he went on to become the world’s biggest movie star.
‘It was crazy,’ Reynolds recalled, thinking of the risks they took on set. ‘Absolutely crazy. But we did it and I’m glad we did it. It would be possible to do it over again. Not for $3 milllion.’
- Thomas W. Hodgkinson, the author of How To Be Cool is available from Icon Books.