The best director Burt Reynolds ever worked with: “God, he was so good”
During the height of his career, Burt Reynolds was known as a former college football star who became the consummate man’s man in movies like Smokey and the Bandit and television series like Gunsmoke. He was a beloved figure in Hollywood, an actor who never seemed to take his profession too seriously, a jock who had simply wandered onto a soundstage and been thrown in front of an eagerly awaiting camera.
Of course, contrary to how easy he made it all look, Reynolds was successful because of his ambition and dedication as an actor rather than because of happenstance and good genes. He caught the theatre bug in college after he was sidelined with an injury, and although it took him a while to transition from hunky roles on television to serious movies after he moved to Hollywood, he had plenty of dramatic experience under his belt to draw on when he did.
His film breakthrough came in the harrowing 1972 drama Deliverance, directed by English filmmaker John Boorman. Set in the Georgia wilderness, it stars Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox as city dwellers who canoe down the Cahulawassee River before it’s dammed. Reynolds played the de facto leader of the group, Lewis Medlock, whose cool confidence, leather vest, and bow and arrow put him in sharp contrast with the more timid members of the group.
The film has an ominous tone that borders on horror, particularly during an infamous scene in which Beatty’s character is raped by a local man at gunpoint and told to “squeal like a pig” before Medlock shoots the attacker with his bow and arrow. It’s a scene that is seared into the memory of pretty much anyone who’s seen the film, but the story is unsettling throughout, right up until the ending that pre-empts Brian De Palma’s jump scare at the end of Carrie.
Viewers might find it a tough watch, but for Reynolds, Deliverance was a peak experience as an actor. “John Boorman was the best director I’ve ever had,” he told The Observer in 2017. “We would do the script and then he would say, ‘What else do you want to do?’ And we’d do something else. And you had no idea what he was going to use. And he cut and spliced, and he’d use a little bit of that and a little bit of this. But, God, he was so good.”
Boorman had an uneven track record as a filmmaker, but his movies never lacked style. He followed up the critical acclaim and Oscar nominations for Deliverance with the science fiction fantasy movie Zardoz, a film so outlandish with its ideas and plot that the fact that Sean Connery wears a skimpy red bikini and sports a long dark braid feels entirely appropriate. The director went on to make Excalibur, a gritty, visually arresting retelling of the King Arthur legend that, like Zardoz, goes all-in.
He doesn’t seem like the type of filmmaker that would perfectly complement the easygoing hyper-masculinity of Burt Reynolds, but their collaboration speaks for itself. Disturbing, visually stunning, and immersive, Deliverance is the best film in both men’s filmographies, and a testament to how cinematic masterpieces often arise from unexpected places.
