Deliverance

Burt Reynolds, who died last week at 82, was a better actor than movie critics (honorable exception: Roger Ebert) believed he was.  He was better than even he believed he was, if you look at the interchangeable car-chase roles he accepted.  But had Reynolds been more careful in selecting movie roles, he might have become a legend in the pantheon of legendary stars like Bogart and Gable, not just the biggest box office draw of his time, i.e., the 1970s.

I'd like to point to two Reynolds movies to support my argument.  One is 1972's Deliverance, about four Atlanta businessmen who go on a whitewater-rapids trip before dam project on the river floods the valley to create a lake.  Reynolds played one of the four friends - Lewis Medlock, a bow-and-arrow enthusiast.  As products of the New South - a New South achieving cultural and economic parity with the North through infrastructure projects like the dam and through economic investment - the friends encounter the Old South in the form of mountain men who try to sodomize two of the friends until Lewis kills one of them with a bow and arrow but lets the other escape.  They bury the dead man in what will be the bed of a lake - the perfect cover -  but their efforts to continue down the rapids while being stalked by the surviving mountain man force them to descend to the barbarism of the Old South.  Four men begin the trip, but only three return . . . and if I write any more about it, I'll spoil it for you.  But Deliverance, in which Reynolds gave a masterful performance, demonstrates how the civilized, enlightened New South can't escape the history of the Old South.  Deliverance, which was originally a novel by James Dickey (who also wrote the movie's screenplay), is the American equivalent of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

The other movie, 1978's The End, showed Reynolds' ability to direct a movie as well as handle black comedy, as he plays Sonny, an unscrupulous real estate promoter who attempts suicide after learning he has a fatal blood disease and deciding he'd like to go quickly.  Saved from dying, he's taken to a mental institution, where a fellow patient named Marlon (Dom DeLuise, a common Reynolds sidekick), a deranged schizophrenic murderer, volunteers to help Sonny end it all, with hilarious consequences.  (One of the best scenes is where Marlon recognizes Sonny from his TV commercials selling lakefront property, and Sonny says, "You didn't buy any property there, did you?  I swear there was a lake!" :-D )         

I regret that I haven't seen Starting Over and Sharky's Machine, two more Reynolds movies that his fans say make the case for his abilities as an actor, though I highly recommend 1989's Breaking In, where he plays a burglar teaching a young burglar the tricks of his trade.  A good actor who could have been a great one, Reynolds still left us a view great movies to consider, both once and anew.  Although, of course, the original Smokey and the Bandit from 1977 will remain a perennial favorite among many Reynolds fans, especially those who fondly remember the Firebird Trans Am of those days.  Reynolds drove that movie's Trans Am to glory.  RIP.