Wise Blood

Hazel Motes comes back from the army. Nobody is left of his family and the house is empty. He goes to a town. He decides to preach; but what he sets up is not a church, it is a church without Christ: a teaching with no Jesus, no sin and no need for salvation. He climbs onto a car in the street and says so. Nobody listens. A swindler takes his idea and tries to make money from it. A young man attaches himself to him. Hazel insists on not believing, and the insistence turns into a belief. John Huston directs. Brad Dourif plays Hazel; Harry Dean Stanton is in the cast. The source is Flannery O'Connor's novel. Huston made the film with his own means on a low budget; it belongs to a period away from large studio production. It was shot in real locations in Georgia and local actors were used. The form is black humour; the events proceed ridiculously and the consequences are hard. The southern gothic of O'Connor's text is kept; the narrative shows no character as normal. The matter it works at is that the effort not to believe is itself a belief, and the narrative shows that directly. Brad Dourif's playing carries the film and the character is explained nowhere. Who it is for: viewers who like adaptations of American southern literature and black humour. Who it is not for: the characters are repellent, the narrative closed, and the ending hard.