Gathering for some old-fashioned male bonding by way of wilderness adventure are four businessmen from Atlanta: the self-aggrandizing macho bully Lewis (Burt Reynolds), thoughtful strummer Drew (Ronny Cox), good-sport accountant Bobby (Beatty), and level-headed audience surrogate Ed (Jon Voight). 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. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a sturdy studio drama jolted alive with B-movie savagery or a B action picture with pretensions of seriousness. (It would lose the big one to a more sweeping portrait of American violence, The Godfather.) Boorman, the British genre specialist who made the Lee Marvin existential noir Point Blank, situated the film at the intersection of prestige and exploitation. It earned strong reviews, too, and picked up some major academy award nominations, even inching its way into the best picture race. When else but the heyday of New Hollywood could a shocking survival thriller featuring an infamously grueling scene of sexual violence become one of the biggest hits of the year?ĭeliverance didn’t just make money and the careers of most of its cast. Revisiting the film, on the verge of its 50th anniversary, feels like its own choppy expedition into the rough-and-tumble past.

It’s a version of America nearly extinct, the more wild and dangerous one traversed by the explorers of legend, that the four city slickers of Deliverance go searching for on their ill-fated canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River.

James dickey's deliverance