Mr. Coward, who went by the nickname Cowboy, was best known for his role in “Deliverance,” which featured Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Jon Voight.
The film is an adaptation of a novel by James Dickey about four Atlanta businessmen on a harrowing canoe trip in rural Georgia.
In the movie, two of the businessmen come across two hostile mountain men in the woods, one of them being Toothless Man.
The men tie one of the friends to a tree, and then force the other to strip down to his underwear and “squeal like a pig.”As the two men contemplate what to do with the friend tied up to the tree, Mr. Coward’s character delivers the line, “He got a real purty mouth, ain’t he?”The four friends are eventually reunited and escape by killing one of the men with an arrow and chasing off Mr. Coward’s character.
The scene is brief, but Mr. Coward’s line became one of the more memorable movie lines of the 1970s and the most remembered of Mr. Coward’s career.
Persons:
Coward, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Jon Voight, James Dickey, Coward’s
Organizations:
Atlanta businessmen
Locations:
Georgia