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Rating: The urban man, the so-called "civilized" man, still belongs to nature, or rather, is still part of it? Accustomed now to dealing with bills to pay and battling traffic, can he still delude himself into thinking he can spend a weekend among the wild woods of the Appalachians instead of playing golf or tennis?
John Boorman is an English director who in his homeland had directed a light-hearted film about the surf group Dave Clark Five in the Beatles era, but his subsequent films shot in Hollywood ("Point Blank", "Hell in the Pacific") reveal his enormous dramatic potential. In 1972, he adapted a story by James Dickey, "Deliverance" (in Italian ignobly translated to "Un tranquillo weekend di paura"), and managed to create a film as sharp as a razor blade.
With impeccable professionalism, he chose four actors for as many characters with profoundly different traits and guided them through a nightmare in which they would lay bare their own weaknesses.
Lewis, as a man of sports, is the leader of the group but will emerge greatly diminished, Ed is his opposite; a timid and prudent everyman with life insurance who will save the group, Drew is the intellectual with sound liberal principles and therefore the weakest and ultimately destined to succumb, Bobby is the typical middle-class American jester always ready for a joke and fond of comforts.
Lewis's adventure consists of descending the river from an isolated village in two canoes and reaching the town located further down. The first indications that the nature of the place and its inhabitants might not be so friendly come from the irony of the man who rents the boats and the musical clash between Drew's guitar and a deformed boy playing the banjo. It's one of the most beautiful scenes in the film. Drew begins to pluck the guitar when suddenly the banjo of the little one sitting on a rocking chair on a porch responds, starting a real musical speed duel between the two that ends with Drew's defeat.
The first day of river descent, despite the difficulties of the four inexperienced canoeists, proves idyllic but then the atmosphere becomes gloomy: the dark and threatening forest spawns its monsters determined to teach the "intruders" a lesson. They will be attacked, and in Bobby's case even raped, by two rough and toothless hillbillies. Terrified with fear, the four "citizens" will realize that the collective life experience they are used to in the metropolis is worth nothing. They will have to rely on their individual strengths, on their animal instinct to survive. The delicate intellectual Drew won't make it, the superman Lewis breaks a leg, it is up to the gentle Ed to bring out his moral resources and lead them out of the nightmare. But is the nightmare really over? Ed is now safe within the walls of his home but awakens in a start every night, dreaming of a corpse's hand slowly reaching out from the river's surface.
And it is precisely the river with its roar and its cold colors that is the main protagonist. The splendid cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond fully captures its changing character, first calm and idyllic and then dark and full of anger. He places the camera at water level to film Drew’s body wedged among the rocks in the rapids, filling the entire screen. He uses an extremely long exposure to create an unnatural moonlight as he follows Ed scaling the cliff to reach the man pursuing him.
Great performances by Jon Voight in the role of the composed Ed, Burt Reynolds as the macho Lewis, and a splendid one by Ned Beatty, who portrays Bobby perfectly.
A great film.
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