John Boorman – The Magnificent 60s

Behind the Scenes: “Deliverance” (1972)

You couldn’t make it like that now, so the ill-informed tale goes. Actors doing their own paddling in canoes, climbing a cliff. But anyone who has watched Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet half-drowning in Titanic (1997) is well aware that it’s just not always possible to use a stand-in for key sequences. Or, for that matter, William Holden breaking in a horse in Wild Rovers (1971).

For a start, there actually were four stunt men on Deliverance, one who was star Jon Voigt’s stunt double. None were credited in the picture, not so unusual in those days, and anyone who knows anything about filming climbing scenes, not least the one where actors are actually crawling across a floor, or where there are, out of sight of cameras, safety facilities underneath, will know that the actors here, though it might get a tad tough, were not risking life and limb. Greater injuries were endured by the stars during the storm scenes of The Guns of Navarone (1961). That said, the movie does benefit from sufficient shots of the actors braving the waters and Ned Beatty nearly drowned and Burt Reynolds cracked his tailbone.

But, of course, danger in moviemaking is relative. There’s scarcely any equivalent to the numbers of deaths that occur in other professions, mining, for example, or industry, and I’m always suprised how easily the Hollywood PR machine is so easily accepted by the public when the peril mentioned is rarely actually perilous at all.

For the scene where the canoe broke, director John Boorman had found a more serene location on a river which was dammed, so he was able to close the sluice gates and lay a rail on the river bed. However, in the event, the sluice gates were opened too soon and the actors engulfed in an avalanche of water.

Should any of the actors show temerity, Boorman would leap into a canoe himself, and paddle downriver over and around various obstacles to show how easy it was.

Deliverance was an unexpected bestseller in 1970, the author an unlikely candidate to hit the commercial jackpot or even to pen such a tale. Ex-adman James Dickey was known for his poetry. Warner Bros bought the book pre-publication about “four decent fellows killing to survive” for $200,000 and more for Dickey to pen the screenplay without working out how it could be filmed. The studio was going through a major transition. In 1970 only three releases had cleared $1 million in rentals; in 1971 the number tripled and the studio was high on a release slate that included Death in Venice, A Clockwork Orange, Summer of ’42, Klute, The Devils, Dirty Harry and Billy Jack.

The studio alighted on John Boorman because he had made Hell in the Pacific (1968) starring Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, that, while a certified flop, was made under arduous physical conditions in the western Pacific.

After the surprise success of Point Blank, British director Boorman had helmed two flops, Leo the Last (1970) being the other, so he was in the market for the kind of hard-nosed project with which he had made his name. Warner “felt I was the man to take it on,” explained Boorman.

At one point, Warner Brothers planned to team up Jack Nicholson (hot after Easy Rider, 1969, and Carnal Knowledge, 1971) and Marlon Brando, still largely in the pre-The Godfather wilderness. The studio tried to tempt Charlton Heston, who turned it down (“I probably won’t have time to do it”) but consoled himself that WB considered him “employable.” Donald Sutherland also gave it a pass. Dickey agitated for Sam Peckinpah to direct and Gene Hackman to star while Boorman was keen to work a third time with Lee Marvin. Theoretically, Robert Redford, Henry Fonda, George C. Scott and Warren Beatty were considered, but such big names would hardly be compatible with the lean budget.

The final budget was a mere $2 million, not sufficient to attract big name – or even to pay for a score. WB had reservations about a picture without any women in lead roles. Jon Voigt was not a proven marquee name, despite the success of Midnight Cowboy (1969). He only had a bit part in Catch 22 (1970) and his other films, Out of It (1969) and The Revolutionary (1970) had performed dismally while The All-American Boy was sitting on the WB shelf, only winning a release to cash in on Deliverance.

Despite a less than buoyant career, Voigt was reluctant to commit. He resisted making the movie till the last minute. Even after trying to convince himself about the film’s worth by reading out the entire screenplay to his girlfriend Marcheline Bertrand (Angelina Jolie’s mother), it took a telephone call from the director and Boorman demanding a decision before he counted to ten before Voigt signed up. Voigt viewed the film as about how men “lose part of their manhood by hiding, coddling themselves into thinking we’re safe.”

Burt Reynolds was treading water in action B-films like Skullduggery (1970), as the second male lead in bigger films like 100 Rifles (1969) and in television (Dan August, 1970-1971). In his favor, he had the lead in offbeat cop picture Fuzz (1972). But it looks like Voigt and Reynolds took casting to the wire. Both were announced for the film a few weeks before it began shooting on May 17, 1971.

Whether it boosted his career is open to question, but Burt Reynolds’ name achieve notoriety in April 1972, a few months before Deliverance opened, by becoming the first male centerspread in Cosmopolitan. Billy Redden, as the banjo player, was hired for his physical appearance, clever use of the camera disguising the fact that there was a genuine banjo player concealed behind him doing all the playing. Boorman used snatches of the banjo music instead of coughing up for a proper score. While the credits claimed the “Dueling Banjos” number had been devised by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandel, Arthur Smith, writer of “Feudin’ Banjos” in 1955, took the studio to court and won a landmark copyright ruling. The tune had received a gold record for sales.

Setting aside any inherent danger in the water, the shore could just be as perilous. A script altercation between Dickey and Boorman ended with the director losing four teeth. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond got into a spat with his union and was slapped on the wrists for operating the camera too often. Filming of the rape scene was uncomfortable for all concerned, even observers. When Reynolds complained the director let the sequence last too long, Boorman countered that he let it run till he reckoned Reynolds, in his character, would intervene.

Despite WB including it in a promotion to its international partners in May 1971 Deliverance, filmed between May 17 – a week later than originally envisaged – and August 1971, sat on the shelf for nearly a year before being premiered at the Atlanta Film Festival in July 1972 with Playboy picking up the tab for flying Reynolds to the event.

These days it would be called a platform release. Deliverance opened in one small house in New York – the 558-seat Loews Tower East – at the end of July and except for Los Angeles didn’t go any wider until early October. Reviews were good, four faves out of five in New York. But it was the box office that caught the eye. An opening day record and an eye-popping $45,000 for the first week took the industry by surprise. It remained at Loews until December. Chicago led the applause in October with a “brawny” $49,000. Everywhere it was hot – “lusty” $26,000 in Washington DC, “socko” $21,000 in Philadelphia were typical examples of the public response.

In what these days would be called counter-programming it went into the New York showcases at Xmas – making off with a huge $589,000 from 46 the first week and $500,000 the second. WB had predicted it might hit $15 million in rentals. The studio was wrong. It scrambled up $21 million. The 1973 tally made it the second best at the box office that year.

SOURCES: Phil Hoad, “How We Made Deliverance,” The Guardian, May 29, 2017; Oliver Lyttleton, “5 Things You Might Not Know about Deliverance, Released 40 Years Ago,” IndieWire, July 30, 2012; Charlton Heston, The Actor’s Life (Penguin, 1980); “Bow and Arrow Party,” Variety, May 20, 1970, p30; “Dickey Ga-Bound,” Variety, January 21, 1971, p4; “Reps of 45 Flags,” Variety, April 14, 1971, p5; “Voigt in Deliverance,” Variety, May 12, 1971, p14; “Runaway Robert Altman,” Variety, December 15, 1971, p4; Advert, Variety, August 9, 1972, p23; “Big Rental Films of 1972,” Variety, Janaury 3, 1973, p7; “Big Rental Films of 1973,” Variety, January 9, 1974, p19. Box office figures from Variety October 11, 1972.

Deliverance (1972) ****

Packs a considerable punch even at the remove of half a century. In fact, the reversal of the ultimate male-domination trope – rape – will reverberate even more in a contemporary society more attuned to abuse. A quartet of macho posturing guys – except for one more at home overseeing a barbecue pit – not only get their come-uppance but have to sit on a very thin fence when the morality clause comes into play.

Much of the patronising attitudes towards the poor and bereft will not have evaporated with time. The better-educated, the very ones who should know better, still make fun of the less well-off and their accents – such scoffing by the privileged recently made headlines in the UK. The hillbillies represented here are not making fashion statements with their clothing or attribute their scrawny physiques to weight-loss therapy. This is poverty in the raw – and yet our quartet treat the wilds as a playground.

Presumably expecting campfire singalongs Drew (Ronny Cox) has brought his guitar, forgetting it might not be so easily transported through the rapids, but he thinks he’s made contact with the inhabitants when he duets with a banjo player (Billy Redden). Macho Lewis (Burt Reynolds), easily identified as the toughest of the quartet by his visible chest hair and archery set, is at one with nature, assuming that the beasts he presumably intends to kill are okay with that. He believes he’s got one-up on the natives when he beats a local down to $40 for moving their cars to the finish-point, not considering for a moment that the fellow would probably have done it for half.

Ed (Jon Voigt) is the calm one, the peacemaker, keeping the volatile Lewis and the nervous Bobby (Ned Beatty), inclined to poke fun, in check. Turns out the locals don’t take kindly to this kind of invasion and two ambush Ned and Bobby, rape the former, but before they can work their way round to the latter, are interrupted by Lewis who puts an arrow through one of the mountain men. The toothless one escapes.

This is where it gets tricky. Lewis, inner Clint Eastwood to the fore, justifies his slaying. Chances are, if he’d fired a warning shot, the rapists would have scarpered. The chances, too, of Bobby reporting the crime are a big fat zero because the humiliation would be unendurable, even if the local cops accepted a crime like male rape even existed, and given the general lack of police interest in female rape no guarantee it would even be investigated.

Course, you kill one of “them” and you’re setting yourself up as a target for revenge. Our quartet would skedaddle but the only way out is downriver. Drew, in complete shock, topples overboard and drowns, the canoes crash into each other, Lewis breaks his leg, leaving Ed to lead them to safety.

He climbs a cliff, armed with the archery kit, in case they are being stalked by the other hillbilly. When he spots him, he fires, killing the hillbilly. So Ed has to get the injured Lewis and the useless Bobby to safety and hope nobody finds the bodies, one buried in the ground, the other dumped into the river. The cops do come calling, but the trio brave it out.

And the audience is left with a moral quandary – an even more resonant one these days. Are the killers morally justified? In, they presume, a lawless patch, where men are as likely to rape their own gender as women, are they permitted to take the law into their own hands? Stand up for themselves? Be a man? Rather than waiting for someone else to clean up their mess.

Or are they obnoxious over-entitled tourists who can pillage their way through the countryside? They had assumed that the hillbillies would not call in the law in case the cops were hunting for illicit stills. As if the mountain men didn’t have families who would hold them dear, no matter their crimes.

Sure, they get away with it, but don’t the rich always get off scot-free, one rule for the wealthy, another for the poor? Back in the day, I’m sure Americans feared these kinds of hinterlands, where mountain men ran wild, and the idea of ecology was a whistle in the wind. Our guys aren’t campaigning against the loss of the wilderness, but enjoying one last trip before the scenery is flooded.

Some standout moments – the duelling banjos (a hit single), “squeal like a pig,” the white water canoeing, Ed ramming his fingers in the corpse’s mouth to check for give-away missing teeth, the nightmare at the end that set a trend for what today would be termed a post-credit sequence.

Director John Boorman (Point Blank, 1972) easily sits astride his own fence. If all you’re looking for is action in an unusual setting and the Western trope of pacific man roused to anger, then you can go home happy. If you’re sniffing around for something deeper, for the ease with which the morally upright defend the indefensible, then you’ll have plenty to talk about. Poet James Dickey, author of the original unexpected bestseller, turned in the screenplay.

Tough thriller that asks tough questions.

Point Blank (1967)****

The Man With Half A Name doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as The Man With No Name. Lee Marvin’s professional thief Walker (first name absent) is a close cousin of the spaghetti western’s amoral gunslinger. But where Leone is disinclined to fill in the emotional blanks in his anti-hero’s story, British director John Boorman, making his Hollywood debut, feels obliged to look for redemptive features in keeping with American tradition.

Along with several unnecessary arty elements, that gets in the way of a brilliant character portrait. The movie also suffers from critical assessment, not in the manner of bad reviews, but from an irrelevant and misleading insistence on discovering the film’s “true meaning.”

However, where Boorman gets it right, the movie is a cracker. The bursts of brutal explosive violence still shock, Walker a force as unstoppable as The Terminator, while representing the Mafia as a faceless corporation is a stunning concept. Walker refuses to recognize the dictum that there is no honor among thieves and expects repaid the money stolen from him by a Mafia henchman. In his mind payment will come either in cash or retribution. There is double-crossing aplenty, but Walker is ready for it.

Boorman’s palette is fascinating, the grey bleakness of early scenes giving way to yellow (even the pillar in a parking garage is painted yellow) and other colors. And he has learned from Hitchcock how to apply silence and use natural sound effects like footsteps.

But there are some changes to Richard Stark’s original novel that the movie can do without. The introduction of the abandoned Alcatraz, for a start, is an illogical nonsense, cinematically stylistic though it is. Walker, as shown in the original novel is far too clever to allow himself to be led to a place so open to ambush. Nor would he allow himself to be emotionally blackmailed into doing the job that caused the trouble; he would have walked away from someone as unstable as the double-crossing Mal Reese (John Vernon).

The ambiguous ending, where Walker appears to fade away, issues unresolved, also attracted odd critical theories when, having spent ninety minutes demonstrating the gangster’s destructive capacity, it seems more likely to me that the two Mafia gents left alone with him on Alcatraz would be in the greater peril.

That said, the rest of the picture has an inbuilt dynamic and Marvin’s laconic menacing performance is mesmeric. By comparison Major Reisman in The Dirty Dozen was garrulous. The original novel was called The Hunter and Walker ruthlessly stalks his prey even though they are some of the most dangerous men alive. Angie Dickinson is dropped in to provide some emotional core and a scene of him as a younger man courting his wife is along the same lines. Ignore the arthouse elements and run a mile from critical theories and you are in for one hell of a ride.