Stars: Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, Ed O'Neill

Director: John Boorman

Summary: Highly original and suspense charged film about the macabre events which befall four city men out on a short canoeing holiday.

Director John Boorman's adaptation of James Dickey's best-selling novel stars Burt Reynolds as the hypermasculine Lewis Medlock. Obsessed with Hemingway-vintage notions about achieving true masculinity by challenging nature, Lewis cajoles three of his friends, Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty), Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox), and Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), into joining him on a white-water canoe trip down an uncharted river in the Appalachians, although only Ed has had any similar experience. The locals that Lewis hires to drive their cars downstream warn him about the difficulty of the journey, but this only makes him more eager to start. The first day goes smoothly as the men learn how to shoot the rapids, and all are exhilarated. On the second day, Ed and Bobby become separated from the other two and reach the landing point ahead of them. Two hillbillies suddenly appear from the forest and decide to hold the two men at gunpoint as the trip begins its tragic downward spiral. Reynolds has one of the best roles of his career in this compelling meditation on the costs of masculine ritual; the film boasts a superb cast as well as the subtle camerawork of the great Vilmos Zsigmond.

WIN DVDs by rating this DVD

Average User Rating:

WIN DVDS by being amongst the first to review this DVD. Reviewing DVDs earns you bonus entries and lets you WIN DVDs!Please login before reviewing this DVD. If you're a new user, register for free and enter to WIN FREE DVDs!

One of the key films of the 1970s, John Boorman's Deliveranceis a nightmarish adaptation of poet-novelist James Dickey's book about various kinds of survival in modern America. The story concerns four Atlanta businessmen of various male stripe: Jon Voight's character is a reflective, civilized fellow; Burt Reynolds plays a strapping hunter-gatherer in urban clothes; Ned Beatty is a sweaty, weak-willed boy-man, and Ronny Cox essays a spirited, neighbourly type. Together they decide to answer the ancient call of men testing themselves against the elements and set out on a treacherous ride on the rapids of an Appalachian river. What they don't understand until it is too late is that they have ventured into Dickey's variation on the American underbelly, a wild, lawless, dangerous (and dangerously inbred) place isolated from the gloss of the late 20th century. In short order, the four men dig deep into their own suppressed primitiveness, defending themselves against armed cretins, facing the shock of real death on their carefully planned, death-defying adventure and then squarely facing the suspicions of authority over their concealed actions. Boorman, a master teller of stories about individuals on peculiarly mythical journeys, does a terrifying and beautiful job of revealing the complexity of private and collective character--the way one can never be the same after glimpsing the sharp-clawed survivor in one's soul. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

Aspect Ratio:	2.35 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Interactive Menus, Scene Access
Subtitles:	Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish
Year:	1972
Release Date:	July 4, 2005
Runtime:	104 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	D 015445
Keywords:	Action, General, Deliverance, Wide, Screen, Adventure
Genre:	Action/Adventure