DELIVERANCE [1972] USA 1972

109 mins Technicolor 35mm Panavision [anamorphic]

2.35:1 Sound: mono

Producer: John Boorman

Production Supervisor: Wallace Worsley

Script / Novel: James Dickey

Director: John Boorman

Director of Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond

Editor: Tom Priestley

MUSIC Duelling Banjos Arranged and Performed By: Eric Weissberg, Steve Mandel

SOUND Sound Mixer: Walter Goss Sound Editor: Jim Atkinson Dubbing Mixer: Doug Turner

LOCATIONS Clayton, Georgia, USA; Oconee County, South Carolina, USA; Rabun County, Georgia, USA; Tallulah Gorge, Georgia, USA; Chattooga River, Georgia, USA

CAST

Jon Voight [Ed Gentry]

Burt Reynolds [Lewis Medlock]

Ned Beatty [Bobby 'Chubby' Trippe]

Ronny Cox [Drew Ballinger]

Ed Ramey [old man]

Hoyt Pollard [boy with banjo]

"Deliverance remains one of the truly most powerful and well-crafted movies of its time. The movie concerns four men, friends from the city, that go out to the back woods for a cannoning trip. The river is about to disappear as result of a new dam being built to provide electricity to the area. The four friends are nothing alike. First there is Lewis (Burt Reynolds), the adventurer, the manÕs man. He has never had insurance since there is Ôno riskÕ in it. Next there is Ed (Jon Voight), the quiet one. Smokes a pipe and is reluctant to take a chance. Then there is Drew (Ron Cox), the one who loves music and sets out on the adventure with his guitar in tow. Last there is Bobby (Ned Beatty), better know as Chubby newest to the group, an insurance salesman. ÒOther mountain people used in the movie weren't so tough, and in fact they were terribly vulnerable.

The face that you don't forget when you see Deliverance belonged to a backward boy of fifteen named Billy Redden, who had the role of a retarded banjo player. His thin-lidded eyes and simple grin are haunting on film, and they were just as disturbing to see on the set. Billy seemed so lost. He went around bumming cigarettes, proud of himself for smoking in public, more interested in his Marlboros than almost anything else that was going on. And he did try to do as he was told, but some things were beyond him. The movie opens with a sequence at a backwoods gas station, where Drew on the guitar and this boy with his banjo start out just sort of picking a few notes, then take off into a burst of bluegrass virtuosity: "Dueling Banjos."

Nobody ever expected that Billy could play that piece, or any piece. The music was all going to be dubbed. But Billy couldn't even fake it. He could make his right hand strum more or less convincingly, but he couldn't imitate the fretwork with his left hand at all. In the end the scene was set up with Billy sitting on a kind of swinging bench, and another little boy hidden beneath it, whose left hand up Billy's sleeve was faking the fingerwork for the camera. Ò I want to look at the way that the first sequence of the film gives us the journey through thelandscape to the filling station, the characterisation of the four men and the way that sound, music and dialogue functions. " Christopher Rickey