Retrospective Film Review

Deliverance (1972) • 50 Years Later

Four city men on a wilderness canoeing trip face deadly threats from both nature and the locals.

Poet-turned-novelist James Dickey’s screenplay adaptation of his own novel, Deliverance, is mostly very faithful to his 1970 story, but the places where it differs are critically important — for better or worse — in creating the film’s atmosphere, and two of them are probably its best-remembered scenes.

First, the rape of Bobby (Ned Beatty) by a pair of mountain men in the backwoods of Georgia is more elaborately cruel in the movie than in the novel. The famous “squeal like a pig” line wasn’t written by Dickey but improvised on location, and its nightmarish quality contrasts with the devastatingly precise but dispassionate style of the author’s prose.

Second, the impromptu “Dueling Banjos” duet, performed by Drew (Ronny Cox) and a local boy (Billy Redden), has more ominous import in the film, presaging the conflicts that’ll erupt between the four city men visiting the Georgia wilderness and its locals. In the novel, both Drew and the boy…