Salvation: Pause at 7 minutes 38 seconds and take a good look at Banjo’s arm in this iconic scene!

Four men decide to canoe down a river in a wild region of Georgia one weekend. What should have been a pleasant outing turns out to be the worst nightmare of their lives. Attacks, rapes, murders, the weekend never seemed so long to them…

After reading the preceding lines, you probably recognize the story of Deliverance. John Boorman’s masterpiece, this is one of the great American films of the 1970s.

Survival shot in extreme conditions (actors will perform their own stunts while descending the rapids), Salvation is a shocking piece of work, still as horrifyingly brutal as ever, that hasn’t aged well 52 years after its release.

Ambiguous about the moral behavior of the audience, the film is also known for two sequences. Rape scene, ten minutes, which makes the movie scary. And another one, which is located at the beginning of the film: the famous and iconic scene of the “banjo duel”, while Ronnie Cox tries to follow the natural rhythm performed on the screen by the 15-year-old Billy Redden.

Here’s another scene for fun…

With her slender figure, broad forehead and almond-shaped eyes, she was chosen by Burman, who found that she would perfectly embody “A typical hybrid child from the depths of the forest”.

Freeze frame at 7 minutes 38 seconds of the movie and take a close look at the actor’s left hand. We often see his right hand plucking the strings of a banjo. But the left hand making the chords doesn’t belong to Billy Redden!

Since the latter did not know how to play the banjo, a special shirt was made that allowed the real banjo hidden behind him to play the instrument. However, the scene had to be shot from a carefully selected camera angle, which should give a sufficiently realistic result when the actor’s blackout, whose hands slipped around Redden’s waist.

Now, when we look at the scene, the result is really amazing.