Deliverance (novel and film)

### Novel

***Deliverance*** is a 1970 novel by James Dickey, his first. It was adapted into a 1972 film by director John Boorman. In 1998, the editors of the Modern Library selected Deliverance as #42 on their list of the 100 best 20th-Century novels. The novel was included on Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.

#### Plot Summary

Narrated in the first person by one of the main characters, graphic artist Ed Gentry, the novel begins with four middle-aged men in a large Georgia city planning a weekend canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in the north Georgia wilderness. The river valley will soon be flooded by a dam to create a reservoir. Besides Ed, the protagonists are insurance salesman Bobby Trippe, soft drink executive Drew Ballinger, and landlord Lewis Medlock, a physically fit outdoorsman who is the driving force behind the canoe trip.

The men begin their canoe journey from the fictitious town of Aintry and on the first evening Ed reflects on the isolation into which the group has now voyaged. The following night, in a new camp, Bobby has changed his mind about the trip and is frustrated by Lewis' leadership, so Ed takes him as a canoe partner to keep the two apart.

Later in the day, two mountain men, one of them toothless and carrying a shotgun, step out of the woods and attack Ed and Bobby. The men force them into the woods, tie Ed to a tree and cut him with his own knife; then, order Bobby to strip from the waist down. The two mountain men walk Bobby to a log and order that he bend over it. The much older man then rapes Bobby causing him to scream in pain at a high pitch that Lewis and Drew hear from a distance. During this assault, the Toothless Man is still holding Ed prisoner. The men untie Ed, and the other mountain man prepares to force Ed to perform fellatio on him. At the moment of the shotgun transfer, Lewis, hidden in the woods, shoots Bobby's assailant with an arrow. Ed snatches the gun from the other man, who runs into the woods, and watches as the wounded hillbilly dies.

The men bury the body and take to their canoes. That evening they enter a high gorge with powerful rapids, where Drew falls out of his canoe; both canoes are capsized, and Lewis breaks his leg. The party's wooden canoe breaks up in the rapids. Lewis declares that Drew was shot by the escaped mountain man. Ed is less certain, but realises that if the mountain man is indeed at the top of the gorge, he can shoot them all if they enter the river again. Ed decides to climb up the gorge and kill the mountain man with his bow and arrow.

Early the following morning, a man appears, and as he spots the tree in which Ed is hidden, Ed shoots him. The rifleman fires at almost the same time, missing Ed, but knocking him from the tree. He is gored in the side by one of his own arrows as he hits the ground. He then tracks the rifleman and finds his dead body in a small clearing. As he returns the body to the top of the cliff, he sees the canoe with Lewis and Bobby in it moving out into the river in the full light. To Ed's terror, he discovers he has not killed the Toothless Man but a man with a partial set of dentures.

The men never know if Ed has killed one of the rapists, a different malevolent mountain man who perhaps shot Drew, or just an unrelated hunter out for a stroll along the top of the gorge. The pair weight and sink the corpse. Ed throws into the river all the evidence of the encounter: his bow, arrows, and the mountain man's gun. Ed, Bobby, and the severely injured Lewis then continue the journey in the remaining canoe.

Ed and Bobby sink Drew's body in the river since they cannot allow medical examiners to see the wound. When the men arrive back at Aintry they explain that they suffered a canoeing accident at a falls just upriver and that their friend Drew must have drowned. Ed and Bobby believe they have their story straight but they soon learn that fragments of their demolished wooden canoe were recovered in Aintry a full day ahead of when they claim their accident occurred. They modify their story to include an earlier accident which destroyed one canoe and fractured Lewis' leg, claiming to have piled all four men into their remaining aluminium canoe, which then also suffered an accident wherein Drew was lost and assumed drowned. Given the impossible chronology and the sudden retelling of the first story, the deputy sheriff grows highly suspicious of them and tells the sheriff that his brother-in-law has been missing since the weekend, believing Ed, Bobby, and Lewis have something to do with it. After a gruelling period of dragging the river in search of Drew's body, the sheriff lets them go with a warning not to return to Aintry.

Ed returns to city life feeling a continuing connection with the river, which no longer exists with the dam's completion. He occasionally sees Bobby before the latter, his business failing, moves to Hawaii, but has little to do with him--"he would always look like dead weight and like screaming, and that was no good to me." Ed and his wife later buy a cabin on another "dammed lake" and Lewis, now with a chronic limp, buys a neighbouring cottage. The novel ends by relapsing into the conventional patterns of city dwellers, almost as if nothing has changed, except for Ed's connection with the now-drowned river, which has made the rest of his conventional life tolerable.

### Film

***Deliverance*** is a 1972 American thriller film produced and directed by John Boorman, and starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox, with the latter two making their feature film debuts. The film is based on the 1970 novel of the same name by American author James Dickey, who has a small role in the film as the Sheriff. The screenplay was written by Dickey and an uncredited Boorman. It was a critical success, earning three Academy Award nominations and five Golden Globe nominations.

Widely acclaimed as a landmark picture, the film is noted both for the music scene near the beginning, with one of the city men playing "Dueling Banjos" on guitar with a banjo-playing country boy, that sets the tone for what lies ahead—a trip into unknown and potentially dangerous wilderness—and for its visceral and notorious male rape scene. In 2008, Deliverance was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

#### Release

* August 16, 1972 (US)
* September 28, 1972 (UK)

#### Plot Summary

Four Atlanta businessmen embarked on a canoeing trip through a river in deep Georgia. The reason behind their trip is that the local power company is planning to dam the river, making it into a giant lake. Knowing that this will be the last time they will get to see the river, the group decides to take that last chance. But, when the men come across some hostile locals, things start to take a turn for the worse as one of the men gets raped and one is severely injured while canoeing down the river. Soon enough, the four men begin to realise that they must survive the brutality of the American wilderness. [IMDb.com]

#### Main Cast

* Jon Voight as Ed Gentry
* Burt Reynolds as Lewis Medlock
* Ned Beatty as Bobby Trippe
* Ronny Cox as Drew Ballinger
* Ed Ramey as the Old Man
* Billy Redden as Lonnie, AKA the Banjo Boy
* Bill McKinney as Mountain Man
* Herbert 'Cowboy' Coward as Toothless Man
* James Dickey as Sheriff Bullard
* Macon McCalman as Deputy Sheriff Arthur Queen