28° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
FESTA MOBILE - JOHN BOORMAN

DELIVERANCE

DELIVERANCE
by John Boorman
Country: USA
Year: 1972
Duration: 110'


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

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