“Night has fallen. And there is nothin' we can do about it.”
- Ed/Deliverance
Do you remember the first movie you saw that rocked your world? If you're a movie lover, do you remember the first one that made you fall in love with them? I remember mine. In fact, I can tell you the year, the date and the day of the week.
It was Tuesday, November 7, 1972. I was 14. I was spending the night at my sister and brother-in-law's in our small town. I have zero recollection of why the three of us ended up going to see a movie. It's not as if it was a common thing we did together. Did any of us know what it was about? But, there we were that evening, at the old Kennedy Theatre just off the square, for the showing of Deliverance.
The movie, based on the novel by James Dickey, is about four friends, city dwellers, who decide to take canoes down a wild gnarly river in northern Georgia before the area gets damned and it all is flooded and disappears. In the course of doing so, they are assaulted by a couple of psychotic hill folk and a nightmare plays out over the course of the movie.
This movie is known almost exclusively for one particular scene. So much so that it's now a cultural reference that most everyone is familiar with. Other than the fact that it's important to the story itself, it doesn't have anything to do with my love for the film.
I was raised on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, movies on TV like House on a Haunted Hill and Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, so I was not a sheltered kid. None of us were in those days. But Deliverance took things to some other dimension. The gritty realism of the film, the moral quandary that faces the men as they try to save themselves was so compelling to me that it was almost rapturous. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I'd never seen a movie of that caliber and I was changed by it. After that night I was done with anything that had a whiff of adolescence. Goodbye to The Love Bug, bring on The Godfather.
I remember Deliverance as fondly as a first kiss. It pointed me to a new reality in what movies could be - not just entertainment but nourishment for the spirit. Most people usually laugh and raise eyebrows when I tell them of my reverence for it. That's okay. I know they're not true believers in movie magic.
Why do I recall the date exactly? It's because that was the night of the 1972 Nixon/McGovern Presidential Election. We came back from the movie and watched the returns on TV. Mostly, though, we stayed up talking about what we'd just seen on the big screen.
Now, here's a little six-degrees of separation for you. Deliverance has a dynamite cast. Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Ronnie Cox are the four friends on the doomed adventure. There is a scene early on when they are trying to get someone to ferry their vehicles down river so they'll be there we they finish the excursion. They'd been told that a man named Griner might do it. They go to the man's machine shop where's he's working inside and Burt Reynolds' character, Lewis, asks about the possibility and an offer of $40 to do it.
Griner asks, annoyed by such foolishness, why they want to go messin' around with that river. Burt Reynolds answers, “Because it's there.” To which Griner responds, “It's there alright. You get in there and can't get out, you're gonna wish it wasn't.”
The character of Griner is played by Seamon Glass. Glass was one of those larger than life guys. He joined the Marines at 17 and fought in the Pacific in WWII. He was a professional boxer, an English teacher, a bodyguard, a newspaper columnist, an author and an actor. He died in 2016.
My longtime buddy, Clayton Moore, here in Springfield/Nixa did some acting himself back in the day. He was in a movie with Seamon Glass and has told me some stories of the experience. My favorite is what he told Clayton about reading for the part of Griner.
They told him they were looking for a character who looked like he could kick both Burt Reynolds' and Jon Voight's asses at the same time. Glass responded, “I don't know if I look like it or not, but I could.”