There’s no mistaking the bold dichotomies at work here: Man versus nature, civilization versus savagery, city versus country, strong versus weak. For better or worse, Deliverance doesn’t smuggle its themes onto a wayward river adventure, but uses its adventure to demonstrate its theme, which risks making it heavyhanded and schematic. Yet Boorman and his actors, shooting on lakes and rivers in Georgia and South Carolina, took great care in making Deliverance persuasive on a purely visceral level, to where it doesn’t often feel like a thesis in action. Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ronny Cox, and Ned Beatty are all superb as the ill-fated quartet, who begin their journey with some uneasy exchanges with the inbred natives and soon encounter greater tests to their manhood than negotiating the rapids. An assault on Beatty prompts the men to retaliate, but they’re soon reduced to playing the world’s most dangerous game on someone else’s turf.
Will they be man enough to survive? The question distinctly echoes another film from that period, Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs, and reflects a culture that was reexamining conventional notions of masculinity, sometimes crudely, as gender roles were starting to shift. Boorman has a broader agenda than Peckinpah, touching on the wisdom of progress and the breakdown of communication between two markedly different American tribes, but they share a talent for making those themes felt. The two famous sequences—Cox’s “Dueling Banjos” showdown with an inbred kid and the Beatty’s rape—are small masterpieces of escalating tension and suspense, and the quartet’s fight for survival has a tactile desperation that keeps the messaging at bay. For a time, these men represent nothing beyond raw human terror.
Key features: Most of the features—including a superb Boorman commentary and a handful of documentary featurettes—are imported from previous editions, but the new Blu-ray version gathers the four lead actors for a great reminiscence about their at-times difficult experience on set.
