deliverance Ed, Lewis, Bobby and Drew decide to leave the chaos of the city behind and spend a quiet weekend surrounded by nature. They go into the Appalachian mountains with the idea of canoeing down the Cahulawassee river, an area that was soon to be flooded since the construction of a dam would swallow up the river. But the four men are overwhelmed by tensions within the group, by the brutal hostility of the locals and by their own inadequacy. “I think Dickey belonged to that particularly southern theme of the sort of survivalist. You know, the man in the American outback tradition of being able to survive in the woods. But for me, the idea that this beautiful river was going to be damned and destroyed was a fantastic kind of symbol about man’s attempt to conquer nature. Rape scene was to me in some ways the heart of the film, because it was the rape of the river by the urban men and the rape of them by nature’s revenge, if you like, if you can consider the mountain men as being sort of malignant spirit of the forest.”
Biography
film director
John Boorman
(Shepperton, United Kingdom, 1933), after debuting in radio and at Southern Television as a film editor, became the director of BBC’s documentary section. Catch Us If You Can was his first fiction film. He next directed Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific in the United States; both films were very successful and were harbingers of his most exemplary film, Deliverance (1972). His career progressed with many films that followed in the traces of his established themes: from Zardoz (1974) to The Tailor of Panama (2001), from John Le Carré, by way of Excalibur (1981) and The Emerald Forest (1985).
FILMOGRAFIA
Catch Us If You Can (Prendeteci se potete, 1965), Point Blank (Senza un attimo di tregua, 1967), Hell in the Pacific (Duello nel Pacifico, 1968), Leo the Last (Leone l’ultimo, 1970), Deliverance (Un tranquillo weekend di paura, 1972), Zardoz (id., 1974), The Exorcist II: The Heretic (L’esorcista II - L’eretico, 1977), Excalibur (id., 1981), The Emerald Forest (La foresta di smeraldo, 1985), Hope and Glory (Anni 40, 1987), Where the Heart Is (Dalla parte del cuore, 1990), Beyond Rangoon (Oltre Rangoon, 1995), Two Nudes Bathing (ep, cm, 1995), The General (1998), The Tailor of Panama (Il sarto di Panama, 2001), In My Country (id., 2004), The Tiger’s Tail (2006), Queen and Country (2014).
Cast
& Credits
regia, produttore/director, producer
John Boorman
soggetto/story
dal romanzo Dove porta il fiume di/from the novel of the same title by James Dickey
sceneggiatura/screenplay
James Dickey
fotografia/cinematography
Vilmos Zsigmond
montaggio/film editing
Tom Priestly
scenografia/production design
Fred Harpman
costumi/costume design
Bucky Rous
musica/music
Arthur Smith
suono/sound
Jim Atkinson
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Jon Voight (Ed), Burt Reynolds (Lewis), Ned Beatty (Bobby), Ronny Cox (Drew), Ed Ramey (il vecchio/Old Man), Billy Redden (Lonnie), Seamon Glass (il primo fratello/First Griner), Randall Deal (il secondo fratello/Second Griner), Bill McKinney (il montanaro/Mountain Man), Herbert Coward (l’uomo senza denti/Toothless Man)
produzione/production
Warner Bros. Pictures