The town vs country divide. It’s been with us for a very long time. For as long as towns and cities have existed. And sometimes, this divide can turn nasty. The tragedy of the English Civil War, ‘This War without an Enemy’, the Royalist rural West versus the Parliamentarian urban East, or the equivalent catastrophe of the American Civil War, the agrarian South versus the industrial North. Historical generalisations, of course, but the tension between the two camps, between town and country, provides rich pickings for writers and filmmakers, both in Britain and America.

In Britain, despite the fact that 82.9% of the population lives in towns or suburbs, or maybe because 82.9% of the population lives in town or suburb, the countryside is so often over-romanticised — it’s a national trait— reducing the fields, steams and copses to a weekend playground: cuddly bunnies, cute foxes, adorable badgers and darling Bambis cavorting in Disney-esque woodland — luverly as it all is — when, of course, the reality is far more complex than that. The Ladybird Book of the Farm. In The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972) and Forever Green (1989-92) (the LWT television series), earnest, liberal, middle-class urbanites move to the countryside, encountering rural skullduggery — horse rustlers, gypsies, vagrants, ruffians, vagabonds, spivvy Squires and the like — and sort the place out on their own terms. And in Stella Gibbons’ satire, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Up-from-London sophisticate, Flora, soon has her poor country cousins wrapped around her manicured little finger.

In other interpretations, the countryside is a dangerous, frightening place. In The Wicker Man (1973), a Scottish policeman encounters a sinister laird in a wig (Christopher Lee) and a weird, pagan sect; and in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), set in deepest, darkest Cornwall, resentful locals turn against middle-class newcomers, Dustin Hoffman and Susan George — and things start to get really unpleasant.

Leave a comment

Which brings us to John Boorman’s survivalist thriller Deliverance (1972), adapted from James Dickey’s novel. It’s a cracking film. Beautifully filmed. Four Atlanta businessmen (Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox) go on a canoeing trip in the Appalachian backwoods. Now, I have yet to visit Northeastern Georgia or the Chattooga River, but it looks spectacular, even if the inhabitants look a lil’ bit scary. The group is led by the Burt Reynolds character, Lewis Medlock, a wannabe survivalist. Burt’s the macho, capable he-man, shooting wild trout with a bow and arrow (what is the world coming to?). I understand the appeal of survivalism and self-sufficiency. I do. Not that I would call myself a ‘survivalist’ exactly — he says, choking into his organic, black coffee, harvested by hand in the misty, rugged mountains of Jamaica — but I do understand the attraction. If we were to move to the wilds of the Home Counties, I would be more than tempted to buy a Medieval crossbow, chop wood like Tsar Nicholas II, or set up a windmill turbine on the roof, like David Cameron, one of those things from Richard Scarry, even if my understanding is that unless you happen to live in the Outer Hebrides, there just isn’t enough wind to make the thing financially viable.