Review of Sadgati (1981) by Stephen M — 21 Feb 2011

I just watched this again for the first time in God knows how many years, maybe fifteen or twenty. This is actually probably the first time I've ever seen the movie uncut, without it having been edited for television.

It's funny but Deliverance often gets forgotten when people are talking about the censor-baiting cinema of the early Seventies which pushed back the boundaries of acceptable screen violence, even though it has retained its power to shock better than many of those more notorious movies, the thematically similar Straw Dogs among them.

Boorman's film and Peckinpah's naturally bear fascinating comparison, not least because the theme of the stranger in a strange land is extended in both to the foreign national at the helm: Boorman, the Englishman, shooting in the backwoods of Georgia and South Carolina; Peckinpah, the American, on location in southwest England.

Boorman's is the better picture though because it resonates on a deeper level. In Straw Dogs we sympathise with Dustin Hoffman's mathematician because he hasn't personally done a great deal to provoke the villagers' hostility; the same might also be said of the four canoeists in Deliverance, as individuals, but it's also true to say that as 'city boys' they represent the encroaching 'civilisation' which is set to destroy the local way of life with the imminent flooding of the river valley.