Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1972

The Contenders:

Bob Fosse: Cabaret (winner)
John Boorman: Deliverance
Jan Troell: The Emigrants
Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather
Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Sleuth

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1972

The Contenders:

Cabaret
Deliverance
The Emigrants
The Godfather (winner)
Sounder

Squee! Squee!

Film: Deliverance
Format: DVD from personal collection on Sue’s Mother’s Day present.

If there are two things that everyone, even those who haven’t seen it, know about Deliverance, it’s the opening with “Dueling Banjos” and Ned Beatty being forced to squeal like a pig. There’s a lot more to this film, of course, but those two things are by far the most memorable. This is a film that in many ways defined a particular part of the world. Just as Jaws made beaches a lot scarier and Fatal Attraction made the idea of marital infidelity a lot less attractive, Deliverance put the fear of the backwoods and the inbred into the city folk. This is not without good reason.

In many ways, Deliverance is a high concept film: “Four city men paddle down a river and run into significant trouble with the locals.” Getting there, though, puts us through a terribly rough ride. Once things start to go bad, they don’t stop. Deliverance takes its time for the first 40 minutes or so and then accelerates into increasing amounts of real, believable terror for the next hour or so.