Word: wises
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JOHN HUSTON'S Wise Blood, adapted from Flannery O'Connor's first novel, proves that a spirited story, a lighthearted screenplay and subtle direction can bring a major piece of fiction--Southern fiction--to the screen. Rarely have great pieces of literature been successfully translated into cinematic terms, but Huston and screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald '71 have captured the difficult, often oblique essence of O'Connor's work on film...
...blessing and the mystery of Wise Blood is that it deftly avoids any established category. It is weird. Huston paces his film like a front porch tale-teller sliding through the story with a quiet drawl but leaps out of his rocker to flare with hellfire often enough to keep us nervous, wide-eyed and fascinated...
...SEEM to have passed the anti-hero phase in Hollywood. Dustin Hoffman has abandoned Benjamin Braddock and Ratso Rizzo for Ted Kramer. Even in "B" films like American Gigolo, the misfit hero is not glorified for his sins at the finale but redeemed, primped for "normal" society. But Wise Blood is not a Hollywood film, nor is it about normal society. In Huston's hands, Hazel Motes becomes not a hero or an anti-hero but a non-hero, one of us living out the internal battle between Jesus and Satan...
...bizarre collection of characters, truly worthy of O'Connor, whose novella magically integrates the commonplace and the violent. But without the superb cast assembled by Huston and Fitzgerald, Wise Blood might have been as lifeless as Haze's Church Without Christ. Instead, the cast brings to the screen and earnestness we expect only of top-rank stage actors. There are no holes, no weak links, only simple excellence...
...Wise Blood belongs to Huston and his star, Brad Dourif as Haze. Dourif was the stuttering Billy Bibbitt of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; he looks like a crazed Don Knotts. His eyes contort wildly, glaring unnervingly, distracting from his rigid nose and hard, flat mouth. Dourif's Haze is grotesque, a little man possessed by a shady demon. He believes in his Church Without Christ not with his soul--which is undeniably Christian--but with his body. It shakes with evangelical passion, with barely controlled violent passion capable of murder. And in an ultimate renouncement of Jesus...