Editor’s Note: The following contains references to sexual assault.A group traveling into the remote countryside is unexpectedly abused and pursued, until one member finds the courage to stand up against the attackers. The set-up ofJohn Boorman’sDeliverancewould become familiar territory in 1970s cinema, but the film isn’t about a bunch of teenagers or summer campers, rather four well-to-do businessmen on a canoeing trip. Turning 50 this year, and made during the Vietnam War,Deliveranceprecipitated many of the graphic revenge/slasher movies to come, whilst drawing deep on social concerns of the time.
Set in a wild area of North Georgia about to be flooded by the creation of a hydroelectric dam, Lewis (Burt Reynolds) leads his friends Ed (Jon Voight), Bobby (Ned Beatty), and Drew (Ronny Cox) on a canoeing trip down river. On the way they are attacked by two mountain men, one of whom sexually assaults Bobby. Lewis kills an attacker and the group agrees to hide the body. When they are (apparently) targeted again and Lewis is injured, it falls to Ed to save them.
Deliveranceis defined by two key scenes that linger in the mind long after this haunting film ends. The first is the famous “dueling banjos” sequence.
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At the start of their journey down river, the group encounters some locals at a gas station, and there’s a palpable tension between the tourists and the mountain people. City-slicker Bobby is openly contemptuous of the backward conditions, commenting loudly about junk lying around and mocking the gas station attendant. The frisson is broken when Drew starts playing his guitar and a mountain kid responds in kind on his banjo. It’s a moment of delirious connection through music. However, when Drew reaches out to shake hands, the boy turns away. He’s later seen on a bridge as the group drifts downriver, staring at the men in blank judgment.
It’s very clear that Drew and the others are interlopers, passing into an increasingly strange and foreign territory. The whole area is set to become a lake by the inexorable approach of the dammed water, and there’s an out-of-time sense to the landscape. Lewis is the most comfortable in this setting, a self-styled survivalist who has been on many such trips before. However, even one of the locals warns about the dangers of the area, questioning why he wants to go down the river. “Because it’s there,” is Lewis' glib reply. Over footage of quarrying, the film had opened with audio of him telling the others about the “rape” of the environment by the power company,a choice of language that prefigures the film’s other key scene.
On the second day down the river, Bobby and Ed become separated and are attacked by two mountain men. It’s a protracted, grueling sequence that focuses on the humiliation of Bobby, as he is made to strip and crawl around in the dirt. The sexual assault is still shocking (as any depiction should be), especially so because of its very clear focus on the victimization and dis-empowerment of an individual. Significantly, up to this point Bobby has been identified as the most “citified” of the group. He’s an insurance salesman who is by turns dismissed and bullied by the “risk-taker” Lewis. Bobby’s attackers appear out of the forest to remove the trappings of civilization (his clothes) and then his dignity in a manner that is very clearly about asserting power.
The film is ambiguous as to whether the attackers are motivated by a sense of vengeance for the destruction of their home or whether this is simply an act of random violence. Certainly the themes of civilization vs lawlessness are made clear by Lewis in an earlier scene when he states, “The system is going to fail.” The attack on Bobby and Ed could be viewed as the wilderness itself extracting a terrible retribution on the two characters from the group who had previously shown weakness (Bobby in his urbane dislike for the outdoors, Ed by failing to shoot a deer he had in his sights). While the violence is anticipated to some extent, having been set up in scenes of discord with the locals and Lewis' concern that someone is watching them, the sexual nature of the attack is shockingly unexpected. For audiences of the time it would have been incredibly confronting and perhaps onlyMidnight Cowboy(also starring Voight) had previously depicted sexual assault so graphically in a mainstream movie .
With the ensuing murder of one (and possibly two) of the rapists, it is tempting to viewDeliveranceas an embryonic version of revenge thrillers to come, most significantly 1974’sDeath Wishand 1978’sI Spit on Your Grave. InDeath Wish, the assault of the protagonist’s family during a home invasion is the impetus for him to start shooting muggers on the street.I Spit on Your Gravehas the victim of assault extracting violent revenge on the four men who raped her. However, in those films there is a catharsis for the main characters through violence against the perpetrators.Death Wishexplicitly condones the vigilanteism of its main character as a response to crime, an entertainment aimed at a frightened middle class.I Spit on Your Gravefocuses on the victim in both the assault and the revenge element (where the perpetrators are mutilated before they are killed). While the audience to is permitted to share a sense of catharsis via the violent retribution, it at least suggests this comes at a terrible personal cost.
Deliverancedoesn’t embrace the extremes of those later movies, most significantly in the lack of release afforded by violence. Lewis shoots the first attacker with an arrow, preventing a further assault. However, Ed’s relief turns to obvious horror as the man staggers towards him, dying in agony. An argument immediately starts about what to do with the body, with Lewis successfully proposing they hide the corpse. “Where’s the law?” he demands, countering Drew’s argument they should go to the police. Digging a shallow grave requires the four men to claw in the dirt on their hands and knees, in a manner that recalls the initial assault of Bobby. The last vestiges of civilized behavior are being stripped away from all of them.
When Drew dies on the river, the survivors believe it is an attack by the toothless mountain man who escaped, although the film casts doubt over this interpretation. Ed makes an exhausting climb to the top of a cliff to take out their presumed attacker, accidentally impaling himself on one of his own arrows before taking out a man with a gun. Once again, the moment of catharsis is cut short as Ed notices that the dead man has a full complement of teeth. Checking his mouth, he realizes these are dentures. But still, his later conversation with Bobby (once he has painfully lowered the body down to the river on a rope) makes it clear that neither of them are sure they have the right man. What follows is the laborious concealment of two more corpses. InDeliverance, violence comes with consequences and causes damage to the perpetrator as well as the victim.
In its relentless brutality,Deliverancemost clearly anticipatesThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre, another film where urban outsiders are terrorized by lawless locals in a rural setting. There’s a fear of the remaining “uncivilized” spaces in America at work in survival horror films. Protagonists typically wander into a very bad place and receive a trial by punishment, before some of them escape back to civilization.Deliverancediffers, however, in its extended take on the aftermath of the traumatic event. When Ed, Bobby and Lewis make it back to the relative safety of Aintry (a town that itself is being gradually swallowed by the lake) they are forced to lie to a suspicious police force. We learn that the injured Lewis might have his leg amputated, a metaphorical castration of the character who presumed to understand the wilderness. Obviously traumatized by the killings, Ed breaks down at the dinner table and then acts violently towards Bobby in a debate over what to tell the sheriff.
For audiences of the time, the parallels with the Vietnam War and the terrible toll inflicted on a generation would have been only too clear. “No matter what disasters may happen in other parts of the world, no-one can find us here,” Ed drunkenly states by the campfire, just before the first attack. The other part of the world to which he is referring is obvious, butDeliverancecreates a space through which the disasters of the war can be symbolised. While set in the Georgia countryside, the cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond (who would later work onThe Deer Hunter) makes the woodland seem like a jungle, a morass of green and brown tones that encroaches all around. Ed’s clothing gets slowly torn apart during the film, until the final fight sequence in which he appears to be wearing a pair of combat fatigues and a flak jacket (actually his life preserver). On his long climb up the hill he talks to himself about never getting out of gorge and looks at a picture of his wife and child, who may as well be on the other side of the world at that point. Later, Ed is treated with disdain by the authorities, greeted with silence at the dinner table, and emotionally disconnected when he reunites with his wife, forever an outsider in his own world.
Other films, most notablyRobert Altman’sMASHandMike Nichols’Catch-22, had obliquely dealt with the Vietnam War with reference to previous conflicts, bringing an anti-war, anti-establishment stance to their stories.Heroes, recognized as the first movie explicitly about the war, would not be made until 1977 and concerned the problems faced by veterans returning to life at home.Deliveranceis arguably the most potent film about the trauma of returning soldiers made during the war. Ed’s disconnection at the dinner table and his emotional collapse anticipatesChristopher Walken’s speechless desperation at the end ofThe Deer Hunter. The river journey through a heart of darkness is as rich in symbolism asFrancis Ford Coppola’sApocalypse Now. However,Deliverancewas speaking to an audience in the midst of the conflict in the most visceral way possible. It predicts a heavy price to be paid, both by those who had been in the war and the society to which they were returning.
The film’s final scene (to be appropriated by so many horror movies to come) has the hand of a corpse rising from the lake and Ed waking from the nightmare image. The ultimate message was clear: past violence was coming to haunt a generation. 50 years on,Deliverancestands as a masterpiece of its time, and a film that still resonates in its powerful depiction of violence and its effects. It’s not an easy watch, but an essential one for anyone who wants a better understanding of 1970s cinema and the suffering of a nation at the time.
