Deliverance is one of the seminal films of the 70′s – though its influence seems mostly on the horror genre. It’s hard to imagine films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Wrong Turn without it. Four friends, played by Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Burt Reynolds and Ronny Cox, head to a neighborhood in the south that’s about to be flooded. What they experience is something terrible. Directed by John Boorman, it’s a masterpiece of the tensions of masculinity. Warner Brother has put the film out on Blu-ray for its 40th anniversary, and our review of the Blu-ray follows after the jump.

Deliverance, John Boorman’s breathtaking exploration into the nature of man, is easily one of the most profoundly upsetting and nihilistic films ever made.  What on the outset appears to be a simple man vs. nature tale (four men on a weekend getaway attempt to conquer a soon-to-be-extinct river valley) reveals itself to be far more complex – for it isn’t so much men fighting the untamed natural world but a discovery that they are one and the same.  Stripped of their loved ones, their jobs and their material possessions, the quartet are forced to confront that deep down they are the beasts, no more civilized than the wild rapids they travel across.  Civilization: merely a mask to a hide their base amorality.

Forty years later, Deliverance is just as disturbing (and downright brilliant) as it was upon release.  It is the definition of timeless.  To celebrate the forty-year anniversary and in conjunction with the re-release of the film on Blu-ray, Warner Brothers invited us interview the primary cast (Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox).  In the following interview, Burt Reynolds discusses the ‘rape scene’ auditions, Jon Voight reenacts Boorman’s long one-shots and Ned Beatty & Ronny Cox weigh in on how their novice acting backgrounds affected the group dynamics in the film, among many other topics of conversation.  Hit the jump to watch.