In publishing his first novel in 1970, the accomplished Atlanta poet James Dickey crafted a tale of four suburbanites who head to the backwoods in order to get in touch with a vanishing America, and end up having their bodies and souls tried by the most horrifically grueling of circumstances. The novel ran up the best-seller charts, and it didn't take long for Hollywood to come calling with an option. Dickey adapted the screenplay himself, and the end product- Deliverance (1972) - was a harrowing odyssey that became one of the greatest popular and critical screen successes of the period.

The tale is set against a stretch of Georgia's Chattooga River that the protagonists seek to conquer by canoe before it is destroyed by an incipient dam project. The weekend party consists mainly of tenderfoot professionals, including Ed (Jon Voight), Bobby (Ned Beatty) and Drew (Ronny Cox); the alpha male of the group, Lewis (Burt Reynolds), is a bow hunting enthusiast and would-be survivalist who calls the shots for the expedition.

It doesn't take long for their junket to take on an ominous undercurrent; while they try to arrange delivery of their cars to the journey's end, they're regarded with suspicion by the dirt-poor mountain residents. In a memorable set piece, Drew grabs his guitar and engages in an impromptu duet with a blank-faced, banjo-plucking local boy. (The resulting riffs would become a radio hit of the era known as "Dueling Banjos.")

The first day's travels produce only the thrills of maneuvering the whitewater; however, their exultation will be short-lived. Having become separated from Lewis and Drew, Ed and Bobby elect to pull ashore. It isn't long before the weekend warriors find themselves accosted by a pair of particularly creepy mountain men (Bill McKinney, Herbert "Cowboy" Coward), and find to their building terror that these frightening hillbillies harbor more peculiar notions about male bonding. The excursion quickly becomes a genuine fight for survival, and Deliverance escalates the tension, all the way to its draining conclusion.

Dickey's son Christopher, who authored a memoir of his family and their days on the set entitled Summer of Deliverance, spoke of how his father wanted, and had once courted, Sam Peckinpah as director of the project. Warner Brothers had opted for John Boorman, the British filmmaker whose most noted credits at that juncture were two Lee Marvin films, Point Blank (1967) and Hell in the Pacific (1968).

Dickey and Boorman's collaboration went smoothly through pre-production, but as shooting progressed, their relationship strained to the breaking point. "Boorman had said he was interfering too much," Christopher Dickey recounted. "Said the actors were upset by his presence. Boorman had said, 'Jim, if you want to direct this picture, fine.' Dickey had said of course not, John was the director, John was the auteur. And John had said in that case he thought it would be best if Jim left." (The larger-than-life Dickey did log some screen time as the investigating sheriff in the film's closing sequences.)

The palpable sense of danger one finds in viewing Deliverance is owed in no small part to the location shooting along the Chattooga, which proved extremely daunting to both cast and crew. "Once there I learned the original cast had included Marlon Brando, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda, but then they were informed about the Chattooga, fifty miles of white-water hell and deadly waterfalls running from South Carolina to Georgia," Burt Reynolds recalled in his autobiography My Life. "On a danger scale of one to six, the river is rated a five-the second most dangerous river in the U.S. You aren't supposed to go down in a canoe unless you're an expert. Those big stars wisely got the hell out."

For a sequence where Lewis had to go over a ninety-foot waterfall, Boorman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond shot the sequence with a dummy, only to have the director assess the results as looking "like a dummy going over a waterfall." The ex-stuntman Reynolds volunteered to go for the plunge, and recounted in his autobiography as to how he would come to regret it: "The first rock I hit cracked my tailbone like an egg...I turned several flips, hit something, doubled up, landed on my neck, and entered the hydrofoil at the bottom where the falls plunge back into the river...

"I'd come over the falls a thirty-five-year-old daredevil in perfect shape. When I surfaced about two hundred yards downriver, I was a nude seventy-five-year-old man-yes sir-without a stitch of clothes on." Returning from the hospital for the rushes, Burt asked how the resulting shot looked. "'Like a dummy going over a waterfall,' Boorman said."

Beyond garnering Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Direction and Best Editing, Deliverance gave a career boost to all involved. From the beginning, Reynolds anxiously coveted the project to demonstrate that he could be more than a TV lead; the picture's release closely coincided with his notorious centerfold for Cosmopolitan, and the resulting buzz put him at pop culture's forefront for a decade. Beatty and Cox, whom Boorman cast after seeing them onstage in a Washington, D.C. production of The Pueblo Incident, kicked off their distinguished character careers before the camera. For his part, Boorman became an internationally acclaimed director, a reputation that he continues to enjoy as one of cinema's most compelling visual stylists.

Producer/Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: James Dickey
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Film Editing: Tom Priestley
Art Direction: Fred Harpman
Music: Steve Mandel, Eric Weisberg
Cast: Jon Voight (Ed Gentry), Burt Reynolds (Lewis Medlock), Ned Beatty (Bobby Trippe), Ronny Cox (Drew Ballinger), Ed Ramey (old man), Billy Redden (Lonny).
C-110m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

by Jay Steinberg