Deliverance with Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight

Filmed in Georgia is a weekly column by Frank Hotchkiss, the Savannah author of Playing with Fire at local bookstores and on Amazon. Contact Frank with recommendations for future film reviews at online@savannahnow.com.

If the 1939 premiere of “Gone With The Wind” put Atlanta on the celluloid map, “Deliverance” did the same 32 years later for the entire state of Georgia.

Within a few short years scores of films came to a state, which had been a backwater for filming. Georgia made a dedicated effort to lure Hollywood east with great success. But how in the world could a small budget film ($1.8 million at the time) with a second tier British director and a no-big-name cast make such an international splash?

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“Deliverance,” the first novel by a new author James Dickey, was the story of four Atlanta businessmen paddling down an untamed river to experience the current before it was flooded by a new dam. Instead, it became an excursion into hell that ended with two dead and a sodomy that left little to the imagination.

In fact it was something of a miracle that “Deliverance” got made at all. Director John Boorman couldn’t insure the actors or crew since he didn’t have the money. Completely inexperienced at running rapids like those on the fictional Cahulawassee River (really the Chatooga separating Georgia and South Carolina), the actors did all their scenes without the benefit of any experience on a river and no stand-ins whatsoever.

Ned Beatty was thrown out of his canoe at one point and sucked underwater for a good part of a minute into the rapids, which eventually gave him up. He later said, “I thought I was going to drown, and the first thought was, ‘How will John (Boorman) finish the film without me, and my second thought was, ‘I bet the bastard will find a way.’”

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Two of the leads – Beatty and Ronny Cox – were New York stage actors who had never been in film or television before. The third lead, Jon Voight, was considering abandoning the profession thanks to a terrible film he had just finished, and the fourth lead, Georgia-born Burt Reynolds from Waycross, was unknown for serious roles.

The setting of “Deliverance” could hardly have been more dreary – backwoods Georgia with junk cars and snarling hillbillies who greeted the city slicker canoers like sworn enemies. Boorman sought out hill country locals and found them personified in a 15-year-old school boy name Billy Redden. He had the right look, although hardly demented, so Boorman shaved his head and powdered his face for his close-ups, especially the “dueling banjo” scene (mislabeled since it was a guitar and a banjo held – but not played – by Redden.)

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Since Redden didn’t know how to play the banjo, Boorman had a second boy adept on the instrument hide behind Redden and play, fretting through a special shirt with an extra sleeve that allowed him to play without being seen. This was the first scene shot for the film, and the rest of the movie was largely filmed in sequence, rare in film-making. One bedraggled local extra broke into a jig during the banjo scene, completely spontaneously. Boorman kept it in the film.

One scene that was real with no actors involved was the glimpse through the window of a humble home as an old woman tended to her special needs child. Sadly this was the way it was.

Another scene that was real was the discovery of Cox’s body after overturning in the river and being swept to his death. Cox was double-jointed, and for his “death” scene he dislocated his shoulder and folded his arm behind his head painlessly. It looked awful, although it was a parlor trick Cox loved to pull. As for Reynold’s shattered leg protruding from his pants, Boorman stuck a lamb bone in its place.

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As for the famous sodomy scene, Boorman, Beatty, Voight, Bill McKinney (the Mountain Man) and The Toothless Man Herbert “Cowboy” Howard, who was a friend of Reynolds, toothless and illiterate to boot, rehearsed it for a day, then shot the scene in one take in just four minutes.

A great deal has been written about this scene through the lens of today’s “experts” but a straightforward viewing demonstrates it was far from a sexual encounter but a demonstration of raw power to humiliate outsiders unfamiliar to the locals’ way.

In current terms, it was a power trip that only ended when Reynolds put an arrow through the Mountain Man’s back and out his chest.

Bill McKinney aced bad-guy role in ‘Deliverance’

Bill McKinney, who was trained at the Pasadena Playhouse and Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio in New York, deserves special mention for his convincing, vicious portrayal of a man bent on wielding power like any ruthless thug. Once he was shot through the back with an arrow, McKinney held his breath and didn’t blink for two minutes to make the best shot for Boorman.

In just a few minutes he established himself as one of filmdom’s all-time bad guys.

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McKinney — this was his first significant role — went on to a successful acting career, eventually winning the admiration of Clint Eastwood and playing roles in seven of his films. He was also in John Wayne’s “The Shootist” where Wayne shot him down at the end. A man of considerable talent, he also produced a CD entitled “Love Songs from Antry” recalling his line in Deliverance to Voight and Beatty, “Antry? This river don’t go to Antry!”

Reynolds later said, “I hadn’t paddled a river until we did the movie. None of us had. At that time, no one had done the Chattooga in a canoe, just rafts that crashed and burned.”

The Chattooga River had only 7,600 people annually floating down the river (not canoeing, which never happened as it was considered too dangerous). Within a few years that number had increased to 67,784. The increased river traffic led to the death of 22 rafters, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Reynolds later said, “’Deliverance’ saved me in terms of being thought of as a serious actor. It totally changed my life. It changed everything.” It also put Cox and Beatty on the A-list of Hollywood films, and re-started Voight’s career following “Midnight Cowboy.”

“Deliverance” can be found at your local library and is streaming on Netflix and available to rent on Amazon, Google and YouTube.

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