At my school we were encouraged to join one or more of the many extracurricular clubs and societies, and I recall a bewildering array of choices from archery to playing the zither (not really, but it begins with Z and illustrates the point). I chose Film Club because it didn’t involve any more effort than sitting in the lecture theatre and watching a movie, and this seemed like a fair extracurricular activity to me. Some students must have been in control of the actual film selection because I can’t imagine any of our teachers suggesting 1975’s violently dystopian sci-fi flick Rollerball (set in the then-distant future of 2018) or 1972’s gritty and nudity-containing mob movie, Prime Cut, yet both these movies figure prominently in my Film Club memories. Another movie that somehow made the cut was Deliverance.
Deliverance was a landmark 1972 movie produced and directed by British filmmaker John Boorman, and chronicles the story of a group of city slickers embarking on a canoeing adventure in the remote wilderness of northern Georgia. Burt Reynolds plays Lewis, the most seasoned outdoorsman and leader of the group, with Jon Voight playing his friend Ed, and newcomers Ned Beatty and Ronnie Cox appropriately playing novices Bobby and Drew. Unfortunately for all concerned, things don’t turn out quite the way they were planned.
The film is noted for the music scene near the beginning, in which one of the visitors, Drew, plays Dueling Banjos on guitar with a gifted banjo-picking country boy, played by fifteen-year old local Billy Redden (whose large head and almond-shaped eyes ticked the boxes for Boorman looking for a character suggesting an “in-bred from the back woods”, with all due respect to Redden). Redden didn’t actually play the banjo and wore a special shirt that allowed a real banjo player to hide behind him!
Deliverance is also notorious for the scene later on in the movie when the adventurers are now deep in woods country, and in which Bobby and Ed encounter two shotgun-wielding mountain men. These men turn out to be the last people you would want to meet in such a remote setting, and they tie Ed to a tree by his neck whilst one of them puts Bobby through a gruelling and humiliating ordeal: he is compelled to strip down and then to “squeal like a pig” as his attacker torments him, before finally being raped. It’s grim viewing, and only relieved when Reynolds’ capable character Lewis happens upon the scene and comes to the rescue (if a little late for Bobby) by killing the rapist with his bow and arrow and inducing the second hillbilly to scarper into the woods. The rest of the film involves the panicked reactions of all concerned and the drama of their attempts to escape back to civilisation (where you can safely imagine Bobby would be remaining ever after).
There is a scene in which the guys fall from their canoes whilst riding a particularly dangerous stretch of rapids. Dummies were used in the filming but having viewed the scene, Burt Reynolds requested to have the scene re-shot with himself in the canoe rather than a dummy, in the interests of authenticity. Boorman agreed and Reynolds proceeded to ride the rapids, but fell out, smashed his shoulder and head on rocks and floated unconscious downstream, before waking up with Boorman at his bedside. Reynolds asked “How’d it look?” and Boorman said, “It looked like a dummy falling over a waterfall”!
Get a flavour of the movie by watching this montage below.
