Cinema Speculation

Deliverance

(1972)

At a very young age, I saw my fair share of powerful double features, and even a few triple features.

The aforementioned Joe & Where’s Poppa?

The Owl and the Pussycat & Diary of a Mad Housewife.

Cry of the Banshee & The House That Screamed (La Residencia).

Trog & When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

Equinox & Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

Soylent Green & The Omega Man.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes & The House That Dripped Blood (my favorite double feature of my childhood).

I saw The French Connection on a double feature with Vanishing Point, when Twentieth Century Fox rereleased both pictures together in a citywide car-chasing engagement (Fox would do the same thing with The Seven-Ups, pairing it with The French Connection. Then later get a ton of high-octane mileage by doubling up Vanishing Point with Dirty Mary Crazy Larry).

I first saw The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on a double feature with For a Few Dollars More.

My first official James Bond movie (a seminal moment in a young boy’s life) was in ’71 when Curt took me to see Diamonds Are Forever during its premiere engagement at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (we stood for an hour and a half in a line that wrapped around the huge parking lot and down the block).

And a year later, Curt and my Uncle Roger took me to a James Bond triple feature that was playing at the Loyola cinema, From Russia with Love, Dr. No, and Goldfinger. After the nonstop excitement of Diamonds Are Forever, I found both From Russia with Love and Dr. No dull as hell (these boring movies are James Bond movies?). But as soon as Goldfinger started, I thought “that’s more like it.”

My first Woody Allen movie was Take the Money and Run. Even though I was too young to understand what was being parodied (crime films and television true crime documentaries), I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever seen. When Woody Allen carves a gun out of soap to make his prison getaway (a la John Dillinger) and escapes into the rain, only to reveal a handful of soap suds, I still think that’s one of the great all-time sight gags. But because my mom didn’t like Woody Allen, I didn’t see any more of his movies for years.

So no Bananas, no Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), no Sleeper. Then my Uncle Roger was dating his soon-to-be first wife, a lovely English girl named Jill, and they took me on their date to see Play It Again, Sam.

Again, I couldn’t believe a guy could be so funny. I laughed from the beginning of that picture to the end. I kind of knew who Bogart was, though I doubt I had ever sat down and watched a full Humphrey Bogart movie (actually Curt showed me The African Queen on TV, but except for the part with the leeches, I didn’t dig it). And I know, at that time, I had never heard of Casablanca. But it didn’t matter. I got the gist. When Bogart said his funniest joke in the movie, “You’re as nervous as Lizabeth Scott was just before I blew her brains out,” did I know who Lizabeth Scott was? Of course not. Could I figure out at twelve that she was probably some old-time actress that Bogart did pictures with? Of course. But later when I watched Elvis in Loving You, during one of the nineteen times NBC showed it on prime time network television, I went, “Oh, that’s Lizabeth Scott.” So, if you’re reading this cinema book, hopefully to learn a little something about cinema, and your head is swimming from all the names you don’t recognize, congratulations, you’re learning something.

But I digress.

Suddenly, one week, United Artists did a citywide rerelease of three Woody Allen movies! Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, and Sleeper. I begged my mom to take me to see it, and shockingly, she agreed (on a school night, no less). So, naturally, the next day at school, I regaled the other children with stories about the movie I saw the night before, which had a giant monster boob terrorizing the countryside (“Be careful, honey.” “Don’t worry, baby. I know how to handle tits.”).

But of all the double features I saw back then, none was as powerful, nor as controversial, as the time my mother took me with her on a date to see a double feature of The Wild Bunch and Deliverance.

That particular double feature was controversial when I told people about it then. And it’s controversial when I tell people about it now. Some parents didn’t even want me playing with their children at school because of the wild movies I saw and talked about. I guess they were afraid I’d give their kids ideas, or spill the goods on the taboo images I witnessed. But make no mistake, when I tell the story of seeing The Wild Bunch and Deliverance at eleven—then and now—I’m fucking bragging!

The Wild Bunch was released in 1969. And we didn’t go see it then. Maybe the age of six might have been a little too young for Peckinpah’s masterpiece (though a year later I did see House of Dark Shadows, which had very similar imagery). But even though I didn’t see it, I definitely heard of it. My favorite uncle, Cliff, saw it and told us how amazing it was. And my Uncle Roger saw it, and had similar sentiments. So, for a time, The Wild Bunch became this infamous title in our household. A title that represented an outrageous movie. A movie too outrageous for me.

Another thing that gave The Wild Bunch mythic stature was I never saw trailers for it at the movies, or spots on television. So it was just that title, The Wild Bunch. And the heavy reputation of outrageousness from my uncles. I actually knew so little about the movie, that for years, I didn’t even know it was a western. At first, I thought it was a motorcycle gang movie (I think, at first, so did Curt).

Then in 1971 Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs was released and its distributor, ABC Pictures International, bombarded the commercial airwaves with vivid and dynamic TV spots, where the announcer always made a big deal about Sam Peckinpah’s name, “From director SAM PECKINPAH, the man that brought you The Wild Bunch.” I didn’t see Straw Dogs back then either, but a female child psychologist I had sessions with in school did. She knew I loved movies, so when we had sessions we mainly talked about the different movies we saw. And she had just seen it that weekend, so she pretty much (minus the rape) described the whole film to me, including every step of Dustin Hoffman’s violent retribution (what a cool lady!).

Warner Bros. kept The Wild Bunch in theatres for years and years as the lower half of Warner double features (it’s not like they could sell it to television anytime soon). Which was how I eventually saw it that night in 1973 with my mom and a really classy gentleman named Quincy (who looked a lot like Clifton Davis from That’s My Mama), at the Tarzana Six Movies (back when a six-screen cinema was a big deal).

Obviously, Peckinpah’s masterpiece blew my fucking mind. Especially the shot when they slit Angel’s throat and the blood—in Peckinpah slow motion, which is about a hundred and twenty frames a second—squirts practically into the camera lens. As far as I could tell, they just actually slit Angel’s throat. It would be years and many subsequent screenings before I really understood the movie. And many more years before I was able to truly comprehend not just the film’s power, but its beauty. Unlike his mentor Don Siegel, whose forte was violent brutality, Peckinpah’s violence constituted a turn away from mere brutality. The spurting red blood squibs of Bloody Sam were closer to liquid ballet and visual poetry painted in crimson (in the eighties John Woo would do the same thing with orange muzzle flash). The shock of The Wild Bunch wasn’t just what we saw on screen, but our reaction to what we saw.

It was beautiful and moving.

There was a beauty to these rotten bastards opting to risk everything for a member of their team who none of them particularly liked. Something monumentally masculine and profoundly moving about the Bunch’s incomparably glorious walk to their destiny/doom (it’s truly a moment that can make grown men weep testosterone-salted tears).

Something beautiful in the way they killed (epitomized by Warren Oates’ orgasmic turn at the Gatling gun).

Something gratifying about the lack of consideration in the carnage, whether it’s blowing the medals off the pig general, or Pike plugging that back-shooting whore with a “You bitch!”

Something beautiful about the way they died—filled with little balls of lead, covered in red, spurting blood, Borgnine going down calling Holden’s name (“Pike . . . Pike . . .”).

But then, at the Tarzana Six, it was the pyrotechnics that blew my little ass through the back wall of the theatre.

The film finished spooling through the projector shutter gate and the lights came up for intermission. No doubt, I was all mouth talking about how boss that was (I’m sure Quincy couldn’t believe he was watching The fucking Wild Bunch alongside a little kid).

Nevertheless, it was the second movie of the night that left the biggest impression on me, and the one that dominated the discussion on the car ride home.

John Boorman’s Deliverance, based on the James Dickey novel of the same name, tells the story of four fellas from Atlanta, three of them upwardly mobile family men—Ed (Jon Voight), Bobby (Ned Beatty), and Drew (Ronny Cox)—who follow their roguish bowhunting enthusiast buddy Lewis (Burt Reynolds) for a backwoods canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River. Their excursion is a week before a dam is to be finished that will flood the river under ten miles of water.

The difference between the other three and the bachelor Lewis is pronounced. Lewis talks tough, acts tough (he alone is not intimidated by the backwoods characters they come across), and looks every inch a macho man (before the red shirt he wore as the Bandit, the weird scuba vest he wore as Lewis was Reynolds’ most iconic film outfit). Yet author James Dickey—and the movie—makes it clear Lewis is trying to live up to an idea of himself. He’s not full of shit, but he’s also not the authority he tries to come across as. The way he bluffs the hillbillies over the price of driving their cars downriver is how he bluffs his buddies about his one-with-nature mountain man shtick.

He’s full of consumed facts, rather than experience-derived wisdom. He is quite a good bowhunter—but he’s a sportsman, not a survivalist. More balls than brains, more opinion than knowledge.

Yes, he possesses more instinct than his three companions. But even his instinct, like his whole macho projection of self, is a pose.

Not to say the pose is a lie. Lewis isn’t a fraud—he believes the pose, and it’s a comfortable pose. But it’s not who Lewis is, it’s who he wants to be. The people who Lewis models himself on can’t turn it off and on. Lewis can. If Lewis owned a sporting goods store and needed an extension on his business loan, he could drop the pose when he went down to the bank to have a meeting with the loan officer. He would and could dress and act and talk like an Atlanta business owner. And that wouldn’t be a lie either. Warren Beatty’s hairdresser George Roundy couldn’t pull off the meeting with the loan officer, but Lewis could. It would have been easy for writer Dickey to give the husbands a genuine (paid) river expert as their guide. He could have served the exact same plot functions as Lewis, down to the same colorful commentary that Reynolds spouts through the whole first half (the best half) of the movie. But Dickey wants us to know that as good a game as Lewis talks, he has more in common with the three husbands than the river folk that they come in contact with. Lewis has eaten shrimp scampi and fried calamari in a fancy Atlanta seafood restaurant.

His cigars are Cohibas, not Dutch Masters. He knows how to order a Brandy Alexander and a Harvey Wallbanger and how they’re supposed to taste.

Lewis has seen Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces.

Lewis knows who Roman Polanski is.

This makes sense when you realize that Lewis is a stand-in for the author James Dickey, who in actuality isn’t a Tarzan, but a poet.

The novel is written in the first-person prose of Voight’s character, Ed, but it’s Lewis that the writer identifies with. And it’s Dickey who Reynolds patterned his characterization on. Among the other three, only Beatty’s Bobby is taken in by Lewis’ “Tarzan” act.

Voight’s Ed and Cox’s Drew follow Lewis’ lead, but they’re fully aware of what’s behind it. The fact it’s an entertaining pose is why they enjoy it. And we enjoy it too. The whole first forty-five minutes of the movie is a rollicking gas, and the audience’s enjoyment is built around Burt Reynolds’ running commentary on his fatalistic, yet entertaining, vision of a dystopian future he foresees (“Machines are gonna fail”), that only he alone is equipped to deal with.

And a large component of that enjoyment is that the Burt Reynolds they had become familiar with from his appearances on The Johnny Carson Show is still present in the Lewis persona. The dude that sat on Johnny’s couch, dressed in his head-to-toe leather outfits, drenched in self-love, cracking jokes about his bad movies was recognizable as the speechifying, sexy stud in the scuba vest. Only a less self-deprecating, more dangerous version of talk show Burt.

On the first day Drew announces, “I’m goin’ with you, Ed, and not Mr. Lewis Medlock. ’Cause I’ve seen how he drives these country roads he don’t know nothin’ about.” The first day of the trip, it’s Ed and Drew in one canoe, and Lewis and Bobby in the other. And Lewis barks orders at Bobby all day long. And not out of expertise, or in good natured fun, but as a bully. He refers to Bobby as “chubby,” diminishing his masculinity inside the male group dynamic. It marks him as a “soft man” in ways more than physical. Of this male wolf pack, he’s its effeminate member. Even if Ed or Drew were thirty pounds heavier, they wouldn’t tolerate Lewis’ lack of respect by calling them “chubby.” But since Bobby does tolerate it, it solidifies his position among the other men. Later that night, Bobby whines to Ed about Lewis’ treatment with real anxiety, but it’s not the tone of an indignant grown-ass man. It’s the tone of a whiny adolescent. Neither does he confront the object of his torment. Instead he tattletales to a reasonable surrogate (Ed), in hopes that he’ll intervene.

Likewise, the next morning, Lewis tells Ed, not Bobby, “You take that chubby boy with you today,” further diminishing Bobby’s standing inside the masculine quartet.

This trip down the river isn’t a roller coaster. It requires the individual achievement of each man working in tandem with one another. It’s not like they’re on a fishing trip and Bobby proves the most hapless baiting his hook, or he’s the most clumsy on the basketball court. Yet, to my novice eyes, it looks like Bobby does a good job. He lacks the confidence of the other men, but he’s not an uncoordinated liability.

Inside the group, Ed is the most trusted and liked. Because he’s everybody’s point of contact. Bobby doesn’t know Lewis, he’s invited on the trip by Ed. Drew does know Lewis, but not like Ed does. In Dickey’s novel, Ed is a graphic artist who’s a partner in a dinky ad agency. And Lewis inherited land from his family and lives off his earnings as a landlord. It makes you wonder how Ed and Lewis became friends. How did they meet? What made Lewis invite Ed on their first bowhunting trip? What made Ed go? In the film, Lewis asks Ed, “Why do you go on these trips with me, Ed?”

But Ed replies like a movie character would, “You know, sometimes I wonder about that.” That sounds like a movie line. But in the book, Ed tells the reader why he goes on these bowhunting trips with Lewis, and it’s not to bring home deer meat for his wife to cook up.

He enjoys Lewis’ company and even admires him. He informs us, “He was the only man I knew determined to get something out of life who had both the means and the will to do it.”

Lewis is quick to expound on his philosophy to the group. He also makes speeches of same to Ed in private. But the speeches to Ed are much more intimate. When the group is his audience, Lewis’ braggadocio, his survivalist rhetoric, his reckless driving, his daring to provoke the scary backwoods river rats is a performance designed to entertain the group and solidify his position as their masculine leader. Also, having a captive audience for his Nietzsche-inspired monologues entertains an audience of one, himself.

But when the audience is Ed by his lonesome, it may be written by the same speechwriter, but it’s delivered intimately to and for Ed.

A homoerotic courtship plays itself out between Ed and Lewis in the film’s first half. Not dissimilar to the courtship dance between Randolph Scott and Richard Boone in Budd Boetticher’s The Tall T. Lewis doesn’t need or want Drew or Bobby’s company. He’d much prefer if Ed went on the trip alone. And not for snickering homosexual subtextual obvious reasons. For reasons Lewis not only doesn’t understand, but would never occur to him to examine.

It’s Ed that Lewis wants to go downriver with. It’s Ed that Lewis wants to face the rapids with. The fact that the two men are too shy to share a canoe together during the riding of rough white water is almost adorable. When they do share a canoe, as Ed lounges and Lewis fishes their dinner out of the river violently with his bow and arrow, Lewis performs his macho pose for Ed and Ed alone (it begs the question, who cooked the fish?).

As Lewis prims and poses and opines for Ed’s viewing pleasure, he tells him sarcastically, “You gotta nice wife. You gotta nice kid.”

Ed, not offended but amused, replies, “You make that sound kinda shitty, Lewis.”

To which Lewis (and especially Burt Reynolds) smiles and asks, “Then why do you go on these trips with me, Ed?”

Ed drops his smile, and makes an unaggressive stand for himself. “I like my life, Lewis.”

On the second day of the trip, it’s Ed and Bobby in one canoe and Lewis and Drew in the other. Ed and Bobby get quite a bit ahead of the others (indicating that maybe Bobby isn’t as awkward at this river rafting business as we’ve been led to believe). They pull off to the side of the river to take a break and wait for the other two to catch up. To this point director John Boorman has demonstrated a suspenseful momentum that pulls the audience forward, like the current of the river pulls the men on screen. We feel the pull of the picture. The story and the characters are heading somewhere . . . but unless you’re hip to the plot . . . you really don’t know where. Nor would you be able to guess. Most audiences who saw the movie in 1972 were completely unprepared for the dramatic turn of events; it’s why they were so effective. Most audiences felt there would be a dramatic turn, but that turn would probably be due to the men riding the treacherous rapids down the river. It’s clear something is going to happen on this trip. But other than the fun and games with the fellas’ wolf pack hierarchy, the filmmaker doesn’t foreshadow or indicate in the slightest what that something is. That something is the most profound and disturbing violent sequence in early seventies cinema not directed by Sam Peckinpah. It also became one of the most iconic.

Shortly after Ed and Bobby pull up to the side of the river, they’re confronted by two of the backwoods hillbilly mountain folk that live deep within these woods (Bill McKinney and Cowboy Coward). Boorman has the audience’s first glimpse of the hillbillies—shot through the leaves on the trees as they descend the hill grade towards the intruders—match Ed and Bobby’s perspective of the men. And suddenly—inexplicably—all of us are filled with dread.

The river riders greet the approaching mountain folk with a wave and an awkward “How goes it?”

But the two grubby-looking half-wits, one of them cradling a double-barrel shotgun, are immediately hostile.

At first it appears the two city fellas have unknowingly trespassed on some guarded territory, like maybe the location of a moonshine still operated by the mountain folk. Or maybe our protagonists are being mistaken for some sort of representative of authority by the indigenous natives (the Internal Revenue Service, the federal government, county surveyors). But pretty quickly it becomes clear the two hillbillies aren’t defensive because these city folk have trespassed on their homeland. Instead these men are more like the other predatory animals that call these backwoods home. And Ed and Bobby are more like a couple of river rats that find themselves suddenly face-to-face with a hungry cottonmouth snake.

Bill McKinney, the more dominant of the two hillbillies, begins immediately manhandling soft Bobby (touching his face, tweaking his nipples). The film begins veering away from standard movie suspense to something we haven’t ever felt in exactly the same way in a movie before. John Boorman doesn’t direct a suspense scene, he stages a mind fuck. Because, unlike the manically giggling goofballs that appear in Death Wish, the mountain folk that McKinney and Coward portray aren’t movie villains. They’re frighteningly convincing indigenous natives.

Ed and Bobby are forced to move deeper in the woods away from the river—Get up that hill. Gentlemen, can’t we negotiate something? Just negotiate your ass up that hill!—where Ed is tied to a tree and Bobby is forced to strip naked. Ed is tortured with his own knife, and then McKinney’s lead hillbilly fucks the helpless Bobby in the ass.

As the scene plays out before our unbelieving eyes, we seem to be witnessing not just a rape, or a masculine power subjugation—like we might see in a prison movie—but some sort of ancient ritual that might play itself out in a nature documentary.

The way Ned Beatty’s soft body is sexualized is genuinely disturbing, but like the extremities of the Romans’ beating of Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, not without its sadomasochistic allure.

It’s not “Oh no, I can’t watch this,” it’s the opposite, you can’t tear your eyes away.

After Bobby’s booty is penetrated and hammered from behind, he collapses into the loose dirt and dead leaves, his feminization inside the masculine dynamic now finally complete.

With Bobby busted, broken, and weeping, the mountain folk turn their attention towards Ed, bringing him to his knees as they prepare to make him suck their (likely) dirty dicks.

That’s when Ed sees through the trees Lewis and Drew’s canoe pull up alongside theirs.

Meaning their victim Voight, McKinney asks Coward what’s he want to do with this one?

“He sure got him a pretty mouth” is the nitwit’s now famous reply.

But as McKinney goes to unbutton the fly of his trousers, bowhunter Lewis lets an arrow fly straight through his chest.

Coward runs away uphill (minus the shotgun), and McKinney—like a game deer slowly performing a kicking dying dance—drops dead.

The rape of Bobby isn’t presented like the unfathomable depravity of Andy Robinson’s Scorpio in Dirty Harry. There’s a childishness to McKinney’s torment of Beatty. It’s why the scene seems so real and doesn’t play like a calculated narrative turn. It contains the thoughtless cruelty that only children are capable of. Which is exactly how I reacted to Ned Beatty’s torment when I first watched the movie with my mom at the Tarzana Six Movies. The scene scared the shit out of me. Not the rape part. Because at that time I didn’t know what rape was—even though I had already witnessed a few in movies—even one in Where’s Poppa? played for laughs. Since I had no idea what sodomy was, I had no idea Bill McKinney was shoving his dick up Ned Beatty’s asshole. All I knew was Ned Beatty was being bullied and humiliated. And I was right, he was. Pretty early in life that was something any boy who spent some time on a school playground could understand. What really scared me on that first viewing was those two terrifying hillbilly guys themselves. And this happening, isolated in the woods, away from civilization, seemed frighteningly plausible.

The way people were scared to go in the water after Jaws was how I felt about the prospect of going camping in the woods after Deliverance. Though with Curt out of the picture, and me being looked after by my mom, Jackie, and Lillian, the perils of camping wasn’t something I needed to concern myself over. Me perishing like Isadora Duncan was more likely than being taken camping in the woods by my mother.

Dynamic character actor Bill McKinney would essay a plethora of roles all throughout the seventies and eighties, most memorably as a snarling villain (The Outfit, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Cannonball). While for two decades he popped up in movies and TV shows constantly, especially after he became part of Clint Eastwood’s recurring stock company of players, he never graduated to a villainous character actor that audiences knew by name, the way Neville Brand, Claude Akins, Jack Palance, and William Smith did, but he should have. His performance in Deliverance is so authentic most people still think he was a real backwoods local (like his sidekick Cowboy Coward and that mongoloid with the banjo) enlisted to appear in the film. But only a real actor could control the dynamics of the scene and engage in the performer’s dance that he does with his scene partner Ned Beatty. The actor gives his cornholing half-wit a convincing human primitiveness.

John Boorman’s movie is about the rape, whether the filmmaker wanted it to be or not. After you’ve seen it, you can never get over it. Frankly, Bobby seems to get over it quicker than the audience does. But what the story and the theme of Dickey’s book is really about is what happens after the inciting incident of violence.

Boorman’s narrative led towards the hillbillies all along like bloodhounds following a scent. But Dickey’s narrative propulsion was towards the four angry men’s angry debate about what to do next.

The men in Deliverance are presented with a social taboo—the rape of a male in their group—that, to one degree or another, will hang over all of them for the rest of their lives. Similar to how Boorman’s film presents the same social taboo to the audience, and it hangs over all of our heads for the entirety of the picture (and maybe on the whole car ride home, and when you go to work the next day and tell your coworkers about the wild movie you saw last night).

But the men are presented with an opportunity to bury their secret, because once the dam is completed the entire area will be flooded under ten miles of water. And as Lewis stresses to the other three, “Man, that’s about as buried as you can get.”

In other words, what happens in the woods, stays in the woods. Then these four men can go back to their ordinary lives, with nobody but themselves the wiser. With the movie provoking the audience with the question, What would you do?

Deliverance was Dickey’s first novel. He’d only end up writing three. The third one, To the White Sea, is practically a one-character book, and the character is basically Lewis if he were an Eskimo. Which means it’s Dickey if he were an Eskimo. The first time I was made aware of the book was John Milius telling me how great it was. There was a script in the nineties floating around, written by David Webb Peoples and the Coen brothers, which was terrible. Back then, it was brought up to me once by my agent, and described as a starring vehicle for Brad Pitt. “Brad Pitt?” I asked incredulously, “But the guys a fuckin’ Eskimo?”

Deliverance is a good novel, but strangely incomplete. Most books get reduced when they’re adapted into movies. But Deliverance benefits from its cinematic transformation. You can imagine Boorman reading the novel and getting excited; this adaptation gives him something to do. Boorman makes the story more vivid and compelling. Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew don’t pop off the page the way Voight, Beatty, Cox, and especially Reynolds pop off the screen. Neither do the two hillbilly rapists. On the page the hillbillies are stronger than just an idea, they’re actual characters, but McKinney and Coward make them flesh. There’s an authenticity to their on-screen presence. McKinney, Beatty, and Coward might be acting for the camera, but they’re not performing for an audience. We don’t watch the rape of Bobby, we bear eyewitness.

However, once the debate scene is over, the film peaks. The ambiguity of exactly what happened to Ronny Cox’s Drew sets the whole third act off on the wrong foot. I’m fully aware it’s supposed to be ambiguous. But Boorman’s staging of that section of the action and his direction of Cox’s reaction at first confuses and ultimately irritates. Even if Boorman judged it important that the characters be confused over what happened to Drew (I don’t think it’s necessary), the audience shouldn’t be in the dark.

From here on in, the movie, which was as tight as a guitar string, goes slack.

Ed/Voight’s rite of masculine passage—climbing the hill, shooting the arrow through Cowboy Coward—is never as exciting or tense as it should be because it’s so pro forma its outcome is never in doubt. You worry more for fucking Rambo in First Blood then you do Ed climbing that cliff.

And what should be as equally tense as any earlier part of the movie—the survivors facing the authorities downriver and brazing it out—is a damp wick. Because Boorman makes the unfathomably perverse choice of presenting the entire climax—that should be a nail-biter—under-dramatized.

I mean, what the fuck?

Is Ed going to climb three-quarters of the way up the cliff, then suddenly fall to his death on the rocks below?

I’m guessing not.

When he comes face-to-face with Cowboy Coward, is the toothless cretin going to blow his face off, then roll credits, close the curtains, bring up the lights?

Doubtful.

But them pulling off their elaborate lie with the suspicious sheriff of the backwoods river community, that could go either way. They all could be as fucked as Bobby.

But Boorman presents it so under-dramatized that he could have cut to still pictures as a novelistic narrator filled us in on the eventual outcome. James Dickey himself plays the sheriff, and for the half-assed way Boorman dramatizes the climax he’s mildly effective.

But this is the moment when the movie needs another juicy character to come in and bring the story home. With the right actor in the right third act, the sheriff role could have won the game by stealing home from his position on third (think Wilford Brimley in Absence of Malice).

But there’s an obvious reason why Deliverance dribbles to its conclusion. While thematically it’s rich, and structurally it’s daring to sideline Burt Reynolds’ Lewis just before the third act . . . in this movie, cinematically, it’s suicidal.

The role that Burt Reynolds had played just prior to Lewis was Lt. Dan August on the Quinn Martin cop show of the same name. That role and that show typified his career up to that point. I asked Burt, since he always invested so much personality in his characters, why he had played Dan August so dry?

“Because that’s what Quinn Martin wanted,” he snapped back. “Quinn didn’t want any horsing around from his series leads. You had to play it just like Efrem Zimbalist fucking Jr.”

Nowadays, since Burt became known as a personality actor, his dry staccato line readings as Dan August prove an entertaining change of pace. It’s impressive that, denied his bag of tricks, Burt is still able to deliver. On Dan August, his job was to be John Gavin. But Burt didn’t want to be John Gavin, and despite an entire machine forcing him in that direction, he successfully resisted. But he wasn’t Burt yet either. Only Carson’s couch offered him that opportunity. I asked him, if Dan August had been renewed for a second season would he still have been able to be in Deliverance?

“No way,” he said. Adding, “I woulda been rich but miserable.”

As enjoyable for the audience as show-off Lewis had been in the film’s first half, it’s Burt Reynolds’ officiating over the makeshift court of four that was the finest work the actor had done up to that time.

Watching Reynolds—the sexy stud in the scuba vest—stalking back and forth, making one good point after another as Ronny Cox’s contrarian crumbles under Reynolds’ logic and leadership, it’s easy to see how every bad Quinn Martin television script he performed in, and every bad movie he was the lead in (100 Rifles, Sam Whiskey, Skullduggery), prepared him for the moment when he was able to act in something of quality.

What makes Reynolds so sensational in the “What do we do with the dead fucking cracker” sequence is the actor and the character share a duality. Lewis just isn’t as compelling in the book as he is in the movie. Boorman’s first choice was one of his favorite actors, Lee Marvin. And in the book, yeah, that could be Lee Marvin. But more than likely he would have drunk his way through the role, letting his white hair and white chin stubble give his performance for him. But the book’s Lewis needed Reynolds to bring him to vibrant life.

And Reynolds needed Lewis to prove (in the vernacular of his archnemesis Marlon Brando) that he was a contender.

Once Reynolds landed the role, he seized it, the screen, and the audience’s attention, and turned the movie into a hit.

Like Burt had waited and prepared his whole life to be at the center of a scene like this, in a “real movie” like this, with actors like these, for a serious filmmaker like Boorman—to finally distinguish himself—is how Lewis had waited and prepared his whole life for a no-turning-back adventure like this . . . where he could finally distinguish himself.

Now the survivalist speechifying is no longer rhetoric. Now the moral imperative is no longer an intellectual debate. Now the men are no longer laughing off his philosophy as that of a macho blowhard who’s in love with the sound of his own voice.

Now he is their leader.

Now they look to him to tell them what to do.

Every buck Lewis ever shot an arrow through, he contemplated could he do the same to a man? Now he has. When the occasion presented itself as do or die, he rose to the occasion and was not found wanting.

He’s the greatest John Milius character that John Milius never wrote, and this is his Big Wednesday.

Despite the seriousness of the situation and the stakes involved, neither Burt nor Lewis can keep the smiles off their faces.