“I don’t want this getting around,” Bobby mumbles.Įven before this, however, Deliverance traffics expertly in unease, as these four city dwellers drive deeper into the Georgia wilderness.
Trying to sway the uncertain Ed and Cox’s rigidly objecting Drew, Lewis explicitly dangles the public shame Bobby would endure in any investigation, with the shell-shocked Bobby eventually relenting. (Ed, strapped by the neck to a tree with his belt, is forced to watch helplessly, just as viewers are.) A drawn-out and terrifying scene on its own, Bobby’s rape kicks off the second half of the film, where Dickey’s overheated debate on the nature of masculine virtue versus emasculating society sees Lewis convince his companions to hide the attacker’s body rather than submit themselves to the scrutiny of the legal system. Things go wrong once Voight’s pipe-smoking Ed and Beatty’s portly insurance agent Bobby find themselves at the mercy of two backwoods types (character actor Bill McKinney and nonprofessional former stunt-show performer Herbert “Cowboy” Coward) who, in a legendarily visceral scene, rape Bobby before the late-arriving Lewis kills one with a ready bow and arrow. In it, four middle-class Atlanta suburbanites follow Reynolds’ survivalist-minded Lewis on a white-water canoeing trip down a rural Georgia river destined to be swamped under by the construction of a hydroelectric dam. Our last choice would be to identify with the victim.”ĭeliverance was Beatty’s first film both he and costar Ronny Cox were plucked off of the theatrical stage to support established actors Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds in Boorman’s adaptation of James Dickey’s 1970 novel. My guess is we want to be distanced from it. Said Beatty (who proclaimed a penchant for brutal honesty in such situations): “Somewhere between their shouts and my threats lies a kernel of truth about how men feel about rape. In 1989, actor Ned Beatty penned a brief, pithy opinion piece for The New York Times titled “Suppose Men Feared Rape.” In it, Beatty referenced the decades of catcalls he’d received since filming his infamous rape scene in 1972’s Deliverance, explaining that all those (invariably male) yahoos shouting, “Squeal like a pig!” are telling on themselves.
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