DELIVERANCE: When Art Spawns A Schlock Subgenre

First things first: Deliverance is a not a schlock film.  For many rea­sons that will be explored momen­tar­ily, it’s one of best American films of the 1970’s and a chal­leng­ing work of art that remains potent today.  However, it is also cru­cially impor­tant to the world of schlock because it spawned one of the great­est 1970’s sub­gen­res of exploita­tion filmmaking.

Deliverance is based on a novel by James Dickey, a Southern poet who made his first ven­ture into nar­ra­tive sto­ry­telling with this book and also adapted said tome for the sil­ver screen.  The plot­line seems sim­ple enough on its sur­face: a quar­tet of city-dwelling men — Lewis (Burt Reynolds), Ed (Jon Voight), Bobby (Ned Beatty) and Drew (Ronny Cox) — travel to the coun­try to take a canoe jour­ney down a Georgia river that is about to be dammed up.  Lewis is the macho man of the group and its nom­i­nal leader, with Ed func­tion­ing as his meek alter ego and Bobby and Drew basi­cally along for the ride.

Though the quar­tet is clearly out of place in their rural sur­round­ings and the locals seem skep­ti­cal of their ambi­tion, Lewis’s bravado is enough to sus­tain the group and they set off down the river.  Things go well enough until Ed and Bobby get ahead of the other canoe and stop at the wrong sec­tion of river­bank.  They run into a pair of gun-toting moun­tain men (Bill McKinney and Herbert Coward) who tie up Ed while one rapes Bobby.  Lewis shows up in time to kill one of the attack­ers, thus set­ting into motion a chain of events that will leave two more peo­ple dead and every­one in the group changed forever.

It’s a grim, unnerv­ing sce­nario for a thriller and Deliverance deliv­ers every­thing it promises: the infa­mous “squeal like a pig” sequence is a white-knuckle squirm­fest of the first order, the plot rever­sals that fol­low are sur­pris­ing (and mer­ci­less) and the film remains tense and sus­pense­ful to the very end.  John Boorman directs the story with a care­ful eye and judi­ciously cal­i­brated pac­ing while Vilmos Zsigmond’s evoca­tive, atmos­pheric lens­ing helps trans­form the for­est and the river from set­tings into char­ac­ters that dom­i­nate the sto­ry­line as much as any of the men.

Better yet, the per­for­mances are con­sis­tently excel­lent.  Reynolds informs what could have been a con­ven­tional macho-man role with an unex­pected soul­ful­ness and Voight sells on the grav­ity of every sit­u­a­tion with a con­vinc­ing method-style per­for­mance as a mild-mannered soul who is forced to find his inner war­rior.  Beatty enacts a dif­fi­cult role in a dig­ni­fied, emo­tion­ally believ­able style and Cox scores big with a scene where he argues with Reynolds argue about the moral­ity of their actions.  Better yet, McKinney and Coward will scare the hell out of you as the casu­ally vicious attack­ers.  It’s also worth not­ing that Dickey has a small role near the end as a sher­iff and acquits him­self nicely in a mem­o­rable scene where he goes toe to toe with Voight and Beatty.

However, Deliverance is much more than a well-made thriller.  Its abil­ity to haunt a viewer comes from a care­fully woven series of themes that inform the film’s story from start to fin­ish.  The film uses the river jour­ney as a metaphor that allows it to explore the ten­u­ous rela­tion­ship between man and nature: the river and a moun­tain­side prove to be chal­leng­ing and some­times down­right adver­sar­ial to the men, per­haps as a retal­i­a­tion for the cav­a­lier treat­ment they receive from their unap­pre­cia­tive human inhabitants.

Also, the film explores the nar­row line sep­a­rat­ing civ­i­liza­tion from sav­agery (a dis­cus­sion of law and the cre­ated moral­ity it reflects is a pow­er­ful moment) and it uses Ed’s char­ac­ter arc to explore what it means to be a man as well as the rites of pas­sage one must undergo to achieve that sta­tus.  It’s not the first film to explore such themes but it han­dles them in a thought­ful, non-didactic style that leaves the audi­ence room to fig­ure out its own take on these sub­jects — and the fact that it jug­gles such diverse the­matic aims with skill and pre­ci­sion ensures its endur­ing sta­tus as a classic.

Finally, Deliverance is hugely impor­tant to the world of schlock because its suc­cess set into motion what would become known as the “Southern Discomfort” sub­genre.  This phrase refers a type of exploita­tion film that plays on the city slicker’s fear of rural ter­ri­to­ries by pre­sent­ing sto­ries in which unas­sum­ing city folk ven­ture into the coun­try and run afoul of the wrong local yokels, thus lead­ing to tragedy (as well as highly exploitable action, sus­pense and sleaze).  Most of these films would focus on may­hem instead of the pow­er­ful themes that Dickey explores but they’re all cin­e­matic chil­dren of Deliverance nonetheless.

In short, Deliverance was, is and will always be a land­mark cin­e­matic moment.  Whether you’re com­ing from the artsy side of the aisle or the schlocky side, it packs a punch pow­er­ful enough to take on all comers.