Deliverance ending explained: the third act the 1971 draft answered and the film drowned

The argument

Two third acts, one river

The Deliverance ending, explained by nothing but what is on screen, is a hand rising out of a lake at 108m. Ed wakes; then his wife tells him to go back to sleep, and the film ends on his face. Yet nothing is settled. No one says whether Drew took a bullet. Nor has the sheriff said what he suspects. Lewis, who was wrong about almost nothing for ninety minutes, is out of the story on a hospital bed.

Quentin Tarantino’s 2020 write-up of the film, published on the New Beverly site, argues that this is where the picture goes slack: that Boorman leaves the audience in the dark about Drew, under-dramatizes the survivors facing the law, and that the film “dribbles to its conclusion.” On two podcasts since, with Bill Maher and with Bret Easton Ellis, he has sharpened the complaint into a casting note: the sheriff needed a big, folksy actor who looked like he might figure the whole thing out.

What the 1971 draft contains

The second-draft screenplay, dated January 11, 1971 and credited to James Dickey and John Boorman, is a way to test that. In fact, it contains much of the third act Tarantino is asking for. Lewis delivers a verdict on Drew’s wound. Ed has a shouting match with a deputy who thinks the city men killed his brother-in-law. The final dream puts a body on the lakeshore under a sheet and lets the sheriff lift it. All of that was on the page a year before the film opened, yet none of it is on the screen.

What follows lays the draft beside the film scene by scene, with Boorman’s own commentary as the third voice, and lets the reader decide whether the cuts were a loss of nerve or the point.

Draft vs. screen · scenes 3-16

The dam takes the first act

The film opens on construction footage and voices arguing about a dam. In the draft, though, those voices have bodies and a city. Scenes 3 through 16, by the draft’s own numbering, are an Atlanta first act: Ed and Lewis at a field-archery range hemmed in by a freeway, where Ed’s bow hand jerks at full draw and Lewis names the condition that will matter on the cliff; the four men paying a lunch tab; Ed at his art-director’s desk with a lingerie layout; a dawn bedroom scene with his wife; Drew resetting the controls at his automated bottling plant while Lewis stands among the machinery and predicts that the machines are going to fail.

The vanishing-wilderness crack that opens the film is Drew’s line on the page, delivered on a sunken arcade under the traffic. The first scene the film and the draft share is the gas station, and even there the page says more: the boy with the banjo has a name, Lonnie, and the stage direction writes him as albino. On screen, though, he has neither.

Unity of geography

Boorman describes on the commentary the argument he had with Dickey about this. Dickey wanted the men established at home, as in the novel. Boorman instead wanted what he calls a unity of geography, on the theory that casting and behavior tell an audience what it needs to know. The draft shows that the settlement was not a compromise. The Atlanta act did not shrink; Boorman liquidated it and carried its best lines up the river.

Lewis’s survival speech, written for a factory floor, is spoken from a canoe at 26m. His question about why Ed keeps coming on these trips lands at 27m; in the draft it is a highway exchange in which Lewis tells Ed that city life is boring him to death and, asked what scares him, answers with one word: insanity. Still, that answer does not survive. Neither does the paper deer pinned to a straw bale on the range, which the draft’s own stage direction calls a faint echo of what hunting once meant.

The pose was on the page

Tarantino reads Lewis as a pose: a man who talks a mountain-man game and could drop it for a meeting with a loan officer. The draft agrees with him more openly than the film does. On the page Lewis is a games player, “elegant as a matador” when he blocks an injured mechanic’s path in a dark garage, and Ed in the debate scene is described as falling “under the old spell.” The film keeps the behavior but cuts the commentary. That is the pattern of the whole adaptation, and it starts here.

Draft vs. screen · scene 41

The wrong turn: the encounter on the page

The scene where two men step out of the trees at 39m is the closest match between page and screen in the film. “This river don’t go to Aintry” is on the page in the same words. Ed’s blunder about the still and the whiskey, Bobby’s smart-aleck “cap’n,” the old shotgun: all of it is there in January 1971. Then the differences begin at the sapling.

In the draft the men bind Ed to the tree with his own web belt and unzip his coveralls down to it; on screen the belt is at his throat. The toothless one scrapes the knife across his chest, then drives it into the tree beside his head, and the draft types the two men: an older bearded one and a younger toothless one. Then they march Bobby to a log. The draft writes Ed’s point of view into the scene, and from it he glimpses the green canoe with Lewis and Drew through a slit in the leaves before anything has happened to Bobby, a hope the film withholds until the arrow is already in the man’s chest.

The line that was never written

What is not on the page, though, is the line everyone remembers. The word squeal does not appear anywhere in the 106-page second draft; neither do pig, hog or sow. Boorman’s account on the commentary is that the studio required alternate takes with language acceptable for television, that the crew improvised substitutes on the spot, and that the pig line, which he tentatively credits to Rospo Pallenberg, was good enough to replace the scripted dialogue in the theatrical cut. The draft’s version of what the men say is uglier and more literal, while what replaced it is the thing that turned the scene into a national reference point.

One scripted line did survive the substitution: the order to pray, and to pray good, is on the page and on the screen at 45m.

The prophet’s hand

The draft scripts the killing with more ceremony than Boorman shot. In the draft the bearded man touches the shaft, falls, gets back up with blood on his lips, takes two steps toward the woods, turns back and holds out a hand to Ed like a prophet about to divulge a secret, and dies across Ed’s tennis shoes while Ed, holding the shotgun, is deciding to fire it.

The film instead gives the death to Bill McKinney’s face and a long, unblinking hold; Boorman says on the commentary that the censor wanted the dying shortened and that he refused, because Lewis had to confront what killing a man is. One justification in the draft is gone from the film: on the page, Lewis’s first argument is that the state’s penalty for what the men were doing is death anyway. On screen his case is the jury and the kin instead.

Draft vs. screen · scenes 41-44

Anywhere. Everywhere. Nowhere.

Tarantino’s review calls the debate the real subject of Dickey’s book and the last stretch where the film is fully alive. The draft supports at least the first half of that claim. Drew’s case for the highway patrol, Lewis’s jury of cousins, the vote, the flooded valley as a grave: all of it is on the page in January 1971, down to the order of Lewis’s three words, which the draft gives as Everywhere first and the film reorders as “Anywhere. Everywhere. Nowhere” at 53m. On screen Lewis asks Drew whether he believes in democracy before calling the vote (55m); on the page he tells Drew there is no law here but the four of them and calls it anyway. Ed’s vote is “I’m with Lewis” at 57m and “I’m with you” in the draft, a difference of one word and a whole relationship.

What the film took out of Lewis

The film cut three things from the draft’s version of this stretch, and each one explains a man. Bobby, fresh from the log, walks over to the corpse and kicks it in the face, twice, before Lewis pulls him off. Lewis makes the argument about the sodomy penalty. And after the vote, on the way to the burial, Lewis stops at a sump of black water, hands Ed the death-arrow in what the stage direction calls a silent ceremony, takes it back, draws, aims up into the trees and then slowly down, and shoots it straight into the swamp so that it vanishes into the earth. Drew crosses himself at the grave. Boorman shot none of it.

Boorman describes the debate on the commentary as a scene he first staged as one long take and then, nervous, covered from other angles; he also says the four actors’ real positions on whether to send Dickey home from the location mirrored the characters’ votes. The film’s Lewis is a man whose case is procedural, whereas the draft’s Lewis is a man with a rite.

Draft vs. screen · scenes 46-49

Drew goes into the water

This is where the review and the commentary disagree most sharply, so the draft is the tiebreaker. Tarantino says he knows the ambiguity of Drew’s fall is intended and that Boorman’s staging confuses first and irritates after; the characters may be kept in the dark, he argues, but the audience should not be. Boorman on the commentary says he wanted it ambiguous, that Drew is a man who has betrayed himself and has no heart to go on, and that the viewer should not be sure whether he was shot or let go.

The stage direction in the second draft, written a year before the shoot, says that something happens to Drew and it is impossible to tell what; that he shakes his head, which might just be the canoe striking a rock; and that he pitches over, or is thrown over, or something. So the ambiguity is not a directing choice that got away from Boorman. It is the scene as scripted, and it is the one place in the third act where the draft withholds and the film obeys it.

What Lewis is allowed to say

Every line around the fall trims toward doubt. In the draft Lewis, pulled to the bank with his leg broken, says he saw Drew shot and that he is dead. On screen at 65m, though, he says three words, “Drew was shot,” and the claim of having seen it is gone. Ed repeats the accusation for him a minute later, at 68m, which is how the film keeps Lewis’s version alive without letting Lewis argue it.

Ed’s fury at him is trimmed too: the film keeps “You’re ruined!” at 69m and drops the word that follows it on the page, where Ed also calls Lewis a fraud. And the film strips Ed’s plan of its reasoning. On the page Ed works out that the man will not shoot at a canoe in the rapids and will wait where the water is calm, and Bobby accuses him of setting the two of them up as decoys. On screen Ed says only that if the man knows where they are, then they know where he will be (69m), and points up. The draft’s Ed is Lewis’s part-time protege thinking like Lewis, while the film’s Ed is a man pointing at a cliff.

Draft vs. screen · scenes 50-56

The cliff: a tree hide becomes a cliff top

The climb is on the page: the chimney of trickling spring water, the impasse where Ed can go neither up nor down, and his line at the top, “What a view!” (71m). What happens at dawn, though, is not.

In the draft Ed does not wait on the cliff edge; he climbs a pine above it and builds a tree hide, breaking branches to open a shooting tunnel. The man follows Ed’s tracks in the soft ground straight to the base of the tree, and the arrow, when Ed lets it go with a strangled cry, comes out the back of the man’s throat. Then the gun goes off; Ed falls through the branches; the broken bow is still attached to the arrow that has gone into his side. The man staggers, fires into the ground, kneels, retches the arrow out of himself, and walks away to die against a dead tree, where Ed follows the blood like a dog and finds him.

The second arrow

Boorman kept the wound but lost the tree. On the commentary he explains what the film never does: the arrow in Ed’s side is a second arrow from his own quiver, driven in as he falls, not the one he fired. He also concedes that the shot confused people and that it was the best he could do. The draft has the same injury with a clearer cause; it also has Ed cutting the arrow out of himself with his knife and screaming, the stage direction says, something like Bobby’s scream in the rape scene. The film instead cuts from the fall to the fight without that echo.

The teeth

The one beat from this sequence that reached the screen intact is the denture check. On the page Ed finds a mouth full of yellow teeth, screams, pries an upper plate loose with the knife, and drives it back in. On screen the discovery is the same but the scream is gone; Boorman on the commentary says the point was to leave Ed, and the audience, unsure to the end whether this was the right man. What the film drops is what Ed does next in the draft: he hums a soft-drink jingle over the body, eyes maniacal, then shoulders the corpse in a Boy Scout carry and puts it down at the spot where he shot it. So the adaptation’s rule holds again: keep the act, lose the explanation.

Draft vs. screen · scenes 59, 67-77, 84-87

The body under the sheet

This is the section Tarantino wants recast. On the podcasts he names the type: a Wilford Brimley, a David Huddleston, someone who walks in looking like he is going to be Columbo. He says Dickey is fine for the way Boorman shot it and that the way Boorman shot it is a slideshow. The draft has the confrontation he is describing.

Deputy Queen, first name Arthel, then accuses Ed of killing his brother-in-law, Benson, who went hunting and did not come back. Ed calls the deputy a little bastard and turns the accusation around: maybe the brother-in-law killed somebody. Sheriff Bullard eventually restrains his deputy, lets the city men go with the warning to never come back, and, on the page, adds a last line about the missing man having been a mean bastard anyway. Ed also answers the hired-gun warning with a crack about bow and arrow men.

What the film kept

The film keeps the spine but strips the confrontation. Queen delivers his suspicion to the sheriff, not to Ed: “These boys is lying” (101m). The sheriff’s reply, that they have nothing to hold the men on and should wait to see what the river gives up, is on the page in nearly the same words. The fight is gone, and so is the draft’s hospital gamesmanship, in which Lewis shams sleep, winks, and invents the line about not remembering the last set of rapids while a patrolman listens; on screen the exchange is a whisper at 103m, and Lewis says only that he doesn’t remember anything.

The one-word verdict

The larger cut, though, is upstream. When Ed and Bobby find Drew’s body at 85m they check a wound on his head. “Could have been a rock,” Bobby says, and Ed answers that if a bullet made it there are people who can tell. In the draft they float the body to the canoe, hold the head over the gunwale, and ask Lewis. Lewis, “maniacal and wise” in the stage direction, looks from the wound to Ed’s eyes and says one word: “Grazed.” Then Bobby says maybe. The draft gives the audience a ruling from the only man who claims to have seen the shot and doubts it in the next line.

The film ends the question before anyone can ask Lewis. Tarantino’s complaint, that the audience should not be left in the dark about Drew, was on the table in 1971 and answered with a single word, and Boorman took even that away.

Whose sheet: the Deliverance 1972 ending on the page

The ending is the same cut made one last time. In the draft the drowned valley surfaces a white hand and then a grey hump of corpse; a frogman climbs into a dinghy; the sheriff stands on the shore with Ed, Bobby, and a Lewis on crutches with his leg gone at the knee; a body lies under a sheet at their feet; the sheriff pulls the sheet up with a violent motion, and a matching cut puts the sheet in Ed’s hands in his own bed. Then his wife comforts him. The last shot is the suburban street, every driveway with its car, the neighbors asleep and dreaming.

The film keeps the hand (108m), the waking, and the wife’s voice telling him to sleep, and ends on Ed. Boorman calls the hand a Grail image on the commentary, the unconscious rising into the conscious world, and says it was not in the book. Yet it is in his draft, with a body attached. The draft tells you whose hand it is by putting the corpse on the shore and the sheriff’s hand on the sheet. The film wakes Ed up before anyone lifts the sheet.

The verdict · two positions, both on the record

Tarantino v. Boorman

Tarantino’s position, across the 2020 write-up and the two podcast appearances: the film is never as effective after the debate; sidelining Burt Reynolds before the third act is structurally daring and cinematically suicidal; the survivors facing the authorities should be as tense as anything on the river and plays like the hands of a clock; Voight, handed the picture, does not carry it.

Boorman’s position, on the commentary: some people at the studio felt the film was over once the men were off the river, and he insisted on the scenes after it; the men narrowly avoiding arrest, and what the experience has done to them, are the scenes he likes best in the picture; the editing goes soft on purpose, with dissolves in place of hard cuts, so that the aftermath plays as something closer to a dream.

What the draft settles

The draft settles one question but leaves the other alone. It settles that the film’s third act is not the script’s third act under-directed. Instead it is this draft’s third act drained, and within the two documents in hand every excision runs the same direction: away from statement, toward image. Whether that is a loss depends on what the film is about.

What this page cannot say

Two documents are not a history of intention. The January 1971 draft is not the last script; a shooting script followed it, and Dickey later published his own version of the screenplay. Neither is in this comparison, so the page can show what was on the page in January and what is on the screen, and cannot say at which stage, or by whose hand, each answer came out. Several of the drowned scenes may also descend from Dickey’s novel rather than originate in the draft; the novel is not part of this comparison either. The pattern is real. The verb is the reader’s.

Tarantino’s frame is the question the debate poses, what would you do, which he says the film raises and then declines to dramatize. Boorman’s frame is deliverance itself: four men delivered from the world and then not, a lake rising over a church and a crime, and the crime coming back up as a hand. If the film is about the question, the draft’s third act is the stronger one, and a sheriff who could solve the case would have carried it. If the film is about the water closing over the town, as the sheriff hopes it will, “peaceful” (105m), then a sheriff who solved it would be a different and more comfortable movie.

A third reading

One more filmmaker is also on the record. Asked about the film on a Los Angeles radio show, John Carpenter pushed back on the idea that the two mountain men are homosexual; his reading is that they are power-tripping, the way men in prison are, and lonely. That matters here because Tarantino’s write-up builds its first half on the masculine pecking order and what he calls a courtship between Ed and Lewis. The film’s account of men is contested by its admirers, not only by its critics, and the draft, which spells out more of Lewis than the film does, gives both sides more to argue with.

The evidence is above; which third act you would rather have is still yours to decide.

For another Deep SHT read built on a screenplay against its film, see the Chinatown hub; for the site’s other contested ending, the No Country for Old Men ending explained.

Questions readers ask

Deliverance ending explained: the short answers

The ending

The screenplay

Sources

Sources

Deliverance, second-draft screenplay by James Dickey and John Boorman, dated January 11, 1971, 106 pages. Scene numbers cited are the draft’s. Quotations from it stay under a sentence.

Deliverance (Warner Bros., 1972), directed by John Boorman. Timestamps round up to the whole minute.

John Boorman’s commentary track on the Warner home-video release. This page paraphrases him throughout and never quotes him.

Quentin Tarantino, review of Deliverance published on the New Beverly Cinema site and mirrored on Letterboxd (2020); podcast conversations with Bill Maher and with Bret Easton Ellis, paraphrased.

John Carpenter on Jonesy’s Jukebox, paraphrased.