PrimeWire

The horribly absorbing tale of four city boys who head down river into hillbilly territory and pay the ultimate price, John Boorman’s 1972 thriller, Deliverance, is one of the true masterpieces of seventies cinema, a brutal stand-alone that leaves unrivalled emotional scars.

Shot on location in South Carolina, the film’s most notorious sequence has Ned Beatty’s pudgy innocent raped and humiliated by two demented backwoodsmen in broad daylight on the banks of a raging river. The scene has a truly horrific sense of immediacy, largely due to the believably rapacious performances of character actor, William McKinney, and illiterate, toothless screen debutante, Herbert “Cowboy” Coward. When John Boorman explained to Coward that he had to rape a man in the scene, he replied, “I’ve done worse.”

According to the film’s star, Burt Reynolds, William McKinney went too far in his performance of the scene. “I swear to God, McKinney really wanted to hump Ned,” Reynolds writes in his autobiography, My Life. “And I think he was going to. He had it up, and he was going to bang him. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I ran into the scene, dove on McKinney, and pulled him off Ned. Boorman helped hold him down. Ned, crying with rage and fear, found a big stick and started beating McKinney on the head.”
When Reynolds demanded of Boorman why he’d taken so long to stop filming, the actor alleges that the director replied, “I was waiting for you to run in. I knew when you ran in that I’d taken the audience to breaking point.”

https://www.filmink.com.au/actor-versus-actor-set-thrown-downs