Sexy and sweaty
and over-determined, Deliverance is Querelle
in a canoe. Burt Reynolds, John Voight and Ned Beatty star as city men
way out of their depth in a world where nature rules and where American
masculinity wears a surprising mask.
Dialogue about asses, physical sensations, and genetic deformities cram
the opening act, which brings a quartet of mates with a very set
hierarchy of manliness into the backwoods for a rough-river weekend
canoeing trip. Reynolds plays Lewis, the hairy and muscly leader of the
pack, who knows no fear but carries a crossbow just in case. Voight is
methodical family man Ed, and Beatty is obnoxious, desk-job Bobby.
Ronny Cox is Drew, smarter than Lewis but happy to follow the leader.
On the way to the river, they encounter a hamlet of yokels, where the
famous duelling banjos scene, and some very strange folk dancing, take
place.
The men set off in pairs, but a ways down the river, Ed and Bobby drift
ashore and encounter a couple of horny mountain men, who tie Ed to a
tree and humiliate and rape Bobby over a fallen log. Just before Ed is
forced to give head, Lewis and Drew come to the rescue, with Lewis
putting an arrow into Bobby’s rapist and Drew chasing his accomplice
away. Tensions ensue over how to dispose of the body, whether or not to
tell the police, and how to reincorporate Bobby and the initial aims of
the weekend after what’s happened. Worse, as the journey continues,
Drew is apparently shot by an unseen sniper lurking in the woods, and
the river’s deadly rapids put Lewis out of action and snap one of the
canoes in two.
Deliverance is a fast moving and tense
thriller.
Jon Voight is especially good as the man in the middle, who rises to
the challenge when all is at stake, but who’s too sensitive to be
grateful for the chance to be a hero.
The film’s groovy seventies elements are balanced by its originality
and darkness. Presciently, the film warns against all-male environments
that shun the warnings of nature and biology, a lesson that would bite
gay culture, something nascent when Deliverance
was made, on the arse big time about ten years after the film came out.
Oh, and it would be coy to not acknowledge how hot
Burt Reynolds is in this film, his great big hairy chest and arms
bursting out of a unzipped rubber vest and growling macho, quasi-porn
dialogue like “Insurance? Shiiiit!” and “you did good, chubby, you did
good, yeah” enough to keep you in masturbation fantasies for at least a
couple of weeks.
