Deliverance by James Dickey: the Original Novel (Hamish Hamilton, 1970), Basis for the 1972 John Boorman Movie; plus The Hunter by Richard Stark (1962), Basis for the 1967 Boorman Movie Point Blank

And so begins the third week of posts on books which begat perhaps more famous films. Bored yet? Well, tough: I've still got a handful of these to get through, so it's a case, I'm afraid, of like it, lump it, or find some other equally soporific and supercilious books blog to read (good luck with that). But I can at least promise that each of the remaining books/movies will be of the stone cold classic thriller variety, featuring as their villains a motley assortment of, well, Nazis, Nazis, and, er, more Nazis. Before we get to all those Nazis, though: some leering backwoodsmen! As, in the wake of David Morrell's First Blood, we head even deeper into the American south. Unlike Morrell's novel and its movie adaptation, however – indeed, unlike the vast majority of book-to-film adaptations – in this instance, I reckon the film – adapted by the author himself – is better than the source text...

James Dickey's Deliverance was first published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton in 1970, the same year as the US Houghton Mifflin edition. The jacket of the Hamilton edition was designed by Bernard Higton, a man who I've waxed lyrical about before, as he's based in Lewes, the East Sussex town in which, lest we forget (unlikely, I know, since, I'm always harping on about it), I live and work; he even, at one time, had his studio in the building in which I currently work. Anyway, Higton has had a hand in countless books over the years – not only as designer but also author and illustrator – among them the wrapper for the Hamilton first of Joseph Hone's The Private Sector.

Deliverance, as if you didn't know, is the story of a canoe trip by four white collar types through the Georgia mountains that goes disastrously – and horrifically – wrong; it was Dickey's debut novel, but he'd already had ten years as an acclaimed poet before Deliverance arrived, something which is evident in the prose of the novel: there are long descriptive passages peppered throughout. I actually found it somewhat overwritten, but then that probably speaks to my preference for leaner prose; in this 1976 Paris Review interview, Dickey claims that "Deliverance was originally written in a very heavily charged prose", but that he "spent two or three drafts taking that quality out". Certainly once the canoe trip gets underway there are passages of high tension and moments of memorable terror, notably one uncomfortable sequence that John Boorman's 1972 Dickey-scripted movie adaptation would turn into one of the most iconic cinematic scenes of the 1970s.

That scene is, of course, the assault by the aforementioned backwoodsmen on Ed (the book's narrator, played by Jon Voight) and Bobby (Ned Beatty), during which encounter Bobby is raped. It's a shocking episode in both the novel and the film, but it's lent an added horror in the movie by the ad-libbed "squeal, piggy" dialogue, which appears neither in Dickey's book nor, apparently, his screenplay. Indeed, stripped of Ed/Dickey's verbose narration, Boorman's film emerges as the superior beast, assisted by the genius casting. Voight and Beatty are great, obviously – as is Ronny Cox as the doomed Drew – but it's Burt Reynolds as the macho Lewis who steals the show, especially with the benefit of hindsight: all those action flicks he'd soon be starring in post-Deliverance, and here he's incapacitated and sidelined halfway through the movie. And the ending is rather more downbeat than Dickey's novel, too, suggesting that Ed is more scarred by his experiences than he is in the book.

Given my abiding preoccupation with all things Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark, it would, I feel, be remiss of me not to mention that besides Deliverance (and a good many other fine not-adapted-from-novels films, among them Excalibur, 1981, and – a personal favourite of mine – Hope and Glory, 1987), John Boorman also directed another notable adaptation: the 1967 film of the debut Stark/Parker novel The Hunter (1962), alias Point Blank. As I'm sure is the case for other Stark/Parker fans, Point Blank was my first unwitting exposure to Parker – renamed and fairly drastically remodelled for the film as Walker (Lee Marvin) – and though the book and the film are quite different and separate entities (and not all Parker aficionados are that keen on the movie), for me, Point Blank still stands as one of my favourite ever motion pictures. But more than that, it was falling for Boorman's adaptation decades ago that would eventually lead to my finding Westlake and Stark, and in turn becoming co-blogger on The Violent World of Parker. So in a way, you can blame John Boorman for all the Westlake blogging that's ensued.

Now then. A question: is it safe?