Wise Blood, based on Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel about an inside-out religious fanatic of the rural South, is one of John Huston’s most original, most stunning movies. It is so eccentric, so funny, so surprising, and so haunting that it is difficult to believe it is not the first film of some enfant terrible instead of the thirty-third feature by a man who is now in his seventies and whose career has had more highs and lows than a decade of weather maps.
Mr. Huston’s affection for misfits has never been more profoundly expressed than in this uproarious tale about Hazel Motes, a young Army veteran who returns home from the wars—one assumes Vietnam—obsessed with the idea of founding a Church of Christ without Christ. Hazel Motes is no Elmer Gantry and Wise Blood is no exposé of well-paying religious fakery, although it is about salvation.
