Word: boorman
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JAMES DICKEYS DELIVERANCE more a curiosity than a novel has been turned into one of the purest action films ever made and one of the most effective. Not unexpectedly the film's success can be credited largely to the efforts of producer director John Boorman...
Dickey is lucky that Boorman was the triggerman. Though he does not yet have the kind of reputation that immediately arouses expectations, the British-born filmmaker has shown a willingness to take on hackneyed material and push its freshest-elements to their most complex conclusions throughout his unheralded career. From Having a Wild Weekend to Point Blank to Hell in the Pacific to Leo the Last he has made poignant romance from rock group fantasy, existential comedy gangster shoot-em-up, psychological examination from World War II melodrama, revolutionary parable from absurdist fantasy. His record is not consistently successful...
...Boorman concentrates on the hard-core how rather than the obvious why. The reasons for men's actions in such extreme predicaments are clear, and do not need some sort of metaphysical explanation. The few lines remaining which echo Dickey's cock-eyed pantheism are mouthed by a character, the film's Lewis, who's close to caricature anyway. (All the book's characters are generalized in the film, and we don't know the last name of any or their occupations.) The difference between Boorman and Dickey is best summed up by the director's depiction of a moral...
...reached between Drew and a malformed hillbilly boy by playing a wild duet between guitar and banjo pulls its meaning out of moving fingers, Drew's smiles and grimaces and the boy's seeming impassivity the growing comprehension of the onlookers faces. And when we start to go downriver. Boorman's eye guiding Vilmos Szigmond's camera picks up the release of a smooth-skimming canoe when it catches the current, the disruptive churn of a sudden patch of rapids, the collected stillness of a stoned in pond...
...fluke. I attended the first screening of Boorman's previous film open to anyone outside of MGM brass. Boorman was there. A young, very intelligent and open man, he confessed what he felt were his own limits, saying that he'd blown apart some of his films in desperate attempts transcend story, his hope was to find a situation which could be developed in cinematic terms as cleanly as possible, with little expository verbiage and much complexity of image. At least in technique. Deliverance is the film he's been working towards. You can take any one of his frames...