MUBI

I had had never seen the uncut version of “Deliverance” until 2010, nor had I seen it on a big screen before. This is a beautifully filmed movie (except for the bizarre looking day for night footage on the cliff). The performances are first rate, too (again with a lapse on the cliff).

The best remembered scenes unfortunately overshadow in our collective memory the fine performances that include those scenes. Bobby’s (Ned Beatty) transformation as his inner strength comes out plays in the background of Burt Reynold’s and John Voight’s more active and prominent performances but is really the keystone of the movie without which it would crumble.

I just watched this again for the first time in God knows how many years, maybe fifteen or twenty. This is actually probably the first time I’ve ever seen the movie uncut, without it having been edited for television. It’s funny but Deliverance often gets forgotten when people are talking about the censor-baiting cinema of the early Seventies which pushed back the boundaries of acceptable screen violence, even though it has retained its power to shock better than many of those more notorious movies, the thematically similar Straw Dogs among them. Boorman’s film and Peckinpah’s naturally bear fascinating comparison, not least because the theme of the stranger in a strange land is extended in both to the foreign national at the helm: Boorman, the Englishman, shooting in the backwoods of Georgia and South Carolina; Peckinpah, the American, on location in southwest England. Boorman’s is the better picture though because it resonates on a deeper level. In Straw Dogs we sympathise with Dustin Hoffman’s mathematician because he hasn’t personally done a great deal to provoke the villagers’ hostility; the same might also be said of the four canoeists in Deliverance, as individuals, but as ‘city boys’ they also represent the so-called progress which is poised to destroy the local way of life with the imminent flooding of the river valley.