CLASSIC MOVIES: DELIVERANCE (1972)

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Brief Movie Synopsis [courtesy of The Internet Movie Database]:

Intent on seeing the Cahulawassee River before
it's turned into one huge lake, outdoor fanatic
Lewis Medlock takes his friends on a
river-rafting trip they'll never forget.

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REVIEWS:

"The white water sequences are smashingly vivid and untricky, as is [Director John] Boorman's treatment of his characters. .... Best of all are the performances—by Jon Voight, as the thoughtful, self-satisfied businessman who rather surprisingly meets the challenge of the wilderness; Burt Reynolds, as the Hemingway hero who fails, through no real fault of his own, and Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox, as their two city friends whose total unsuitability for such a weekend venture is just one of a number of unbelievable and unexplained points in the [James] Dickey screenplay. I wouldn't get into a Central Park rowboat with either one, but then Dickey's story is schematic, and to make his points about the nature of man he had to deny the very realism that the film pretends to deal in."

-- Excerpt from The New York Times; July 31, 1972

"['Deliverance'] is...effective on the level of simple adventure. Director John Boorman and his cameraman, Vilmos Zsigmond, get some tremendously good (and unfaked) footage of the foursome shooting some fairly hairy rapids. .... The performances have a validity that transcends the film; Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds and, indeed, all the members of the cast are finely tuned and very good. What the movie totally fails at, however, is its attempt to make some kind of significant statement about its action. .... What James Dickey has given us here is a fantasy about violence, not a realistic consideration of it. The adventures that occur in the film belong in Freudian dreams, and many of the exploits (particularly Voight's scaling of a cliff) are so incredible that we are back in a James Bond universe."

-- Roger Ebert; October 9, 1972

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