Deliverance (1972)
My wife suggested we watch Deliverance, partly on the strength of our shared soft spot for Burt Reynolds, and partly because it sits on a couple of the "greatest ever" lists I'm slowly working through. I was happy to oblige. The only snag was that I'd seen it once before, a good twenty years ago, and my memory of it was of something brutal and relentless, so much so that I actually warned her to brace herself for something in the register of The Hills Have Eyes. On rewatch, that memory turned out to be almost comically wrong. This is a far tamer, slower, stranger film than the one lodged in my head, and the gap between the two is the best argument for revisiting old films I've come across in a while.
Because Deliverance is not really the deranged-hillbilly chase picture that its reputation, and my faulty memory, had made of it. It is a slow, brooding survival drama about four city men canoeing down a remote Georgia river before it's dammed and drowned for good. Far more of its running time than you'd ever expect is given over to these men simply talking: about nature and survival, about the law and its limits, about what a man is and isn't entitled to do once the rules fall away. The horror, when it comes, is all the more shocking for how patiently the film has lulled you first.
Burt Reynolds anchors much of it, and it's a reminder that, when he was on song, he was a seriously good actor, worlds away from the easy grin you get in Smokey and the Bandit or White Lightning. There's real menace and charisma here, a coiled quality that suits the material perfectly. But it's Jon Voight who quietly walks off with the film, in what may be a career-best turn as an ordinary man forced to discover what he's capable of. The cast performed most of their own stunts, canoeing those genuinely dangerous rapids themselves, and you can feel that authenticity in every frame. It gives the physical sequences a rawness no amount of second-unit trickery could replicate.
And then there's the duelling banjos scene. One of the most iconic moments in all of cinema, and rightly so. It's extraordinary. The problem is that placing it right at the start leaves the pacing feeling a little lopsided, as though the film peaks before it has properly got going. That said, the way it haunts the rest of the picture in quieter, warped little variations is a genuinely lovely touch. The film never lets you fully forget it, which ends up being quietly unsettling in ways that are hard to pin down.
What I wasn't expecting, and what I think my younger self entirely missed, is how much this is a film about ideas. Masculinity, guilt, the thin membrane between civilisation and the wild, these are the things Deliverance is actually wrestling with, dressed up as an adventure thriller. The river is going to be buried under a reservoir. These men want to experience something real before modernity swallows it whole. What they find is that "real" has teeth, and that the rules they live by in the city are a comfort blanket they can't carry into the wilderness. The ending, quiet and strange as it is, earns its unease.
So it's a better and more thoughtful film than the lurid B-movie my memory had turned it into. Its front-loaded highlight and unhurried pace keep it from being a perfect one, but then perfection was never really what it was after. It lingers precisely because it takes its time. Three and a half stars, and a rare case of a rewatch not only correcting the record but improving on it.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1972 | Watched: 2026-08-28
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · HBO Max
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Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
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Physical: Amazon US
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