Wise Blood (film)

Wise Blood is a 1979 black comedy drama film directed by John Huston and starring Brad Dourif, Dan Shor, Amy Wright, Harry Dean Stanton, and Ned Beatty. It is based on the 1952 novel Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. As a co-production with Germany the film was titled Der Ketzer or Die Weisheit des Blutes when released in Germany, and Le Malin when released in France.

The film follows the lives of a war veteran preacher and his associates. When he refuses to pose as a prophet for a promoter, the promoter convinces a replacement to copy the preacher's manner of dressing and style of preaching. The preacher eventually blinds himself and becomes unresponsive to his environment. His landlady has an unrequited love for him. She continues trying to revive him, even when he is seemingly dead.

Plot
Hazel "Haze" Motes is a 22-year-old veteran of an unspecified war and a preacher of the Church of Truth Without Christ, a religious organization of his own creation, which is against any belief in God, an afterlife, sin, or evil. The protagonist comes across various characters such as teenager Sabbath Lilly Hawks, who is madly in love with him; her grandfather Asa Hawks who is a conventional sidewalk preacher, and pretends to be blind; and a local boy, Enoch Emery, who finds a "new" Jesus at the local museum in the form of the tiny corpse of a shrunken South American Indian.

Hazel's relationship with Sabbath Lilly goes sour when she takes the tiny corpse that Enoch gave her to pass on to Hazel, and she poses with it in a Madonna and Child manner. Hazel throws the corpse against the wall, and its head out the window. Sabbath Lilly becomes very angry and berates Hazel.

Hoover Shoates is a promoter who wants to manage Hazel's career as a prophet. However, Hazel is not enthusiastic, so Shoates finds someone to dress like Hazel and preach in a somewhat similar way. Hazel finds this out, is enraged, and eventually pursues the man out of town and runs him over with his car.

Meanwhile, Enoch is fascinated with a local show involving a man in a gorilla suit; Enoch sneaks into the promoters' truck, steals the suit, and wanders around town terrorizing people while wearing the suit.

A sheriff stops Hazel on the road and sends Hazel's car rolling into a lake. After this, Hazel deliberately blinds himself with quicklime, a counterpoint to Asa's fake-blinding himself. Hazel's landlady must take care of him, and falls in love with him. However, she is shocked to find he has wound barbed wire around his torso, and has rocks in his shoes.

After her proposal of marriage is spurned by Motes, and he leaves, the landlady calls the police and reports him as derelict in paying rent. The police find Motes lying in rubbish in a semi-conscious state. They return him to the house where he is placed on a bed in the landlady's custody. She promises him an easy life, in any part of the house he chooses, with her waiting on him full time.

The film ends with the landlady's failed attempts to get a response from the now-completely unresponsive Hazel, who may be dead.

Cast

 * Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes
 * John Huston as Grandfather (initially credited as "Jhon Huston")
 * Dan Shor as Enoch Emory
 * Mary Nell Santacroce as Landlady
 * Harry Dean Stanton as Asa Hawks
 * Amy Wright as Sabbath Lily Hawks
 * Ned Beatty as Hoover Shoates
 * William Hickey as Preacher
 * J.L. Parker as Karl
 * Marvin Sapp as Raymond
 * Betty Lou Groover as Leora Watts

Production
Wise Blood was filmed mostly in and around Macon, Georgia, near O'Connor's home Andalusia in Baldwin County, using many local residents as extras. The original music score was composed by Alex North.

New Line Cinema picked up U.S. distribution of the film after the screening at the Cannes Film Festival. A shrunken head from Mercer University was used in the production and appears in the final film. The head was repatriated by the university in 2019.

The director of the film appears in two fantasy sequences as Hazel's fanatical preacher grandfather.

Release
The film premiered out of competition at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival in May 1979. The film was amended—in particular, the soundtrack—and was shown at the New York Film Festival in September and then released in France in October. The film was released for an Academy Awards qualifying run for one week at the Laemmle Royal Theatre in Los Angeles in December before being released in the rest of the United States in February 1980.

Home media
It was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection on May 12, 2009.

Reception and legacy
At Cannes, the film received a mixed reception. Following its screening at the New York Film Festival, critic Vincent Canby called the film "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." Sam Jordison of The Guardian wrote in a retrospective review; "This adaptation is wonderful. It pulls off the rare trick of seeming faithful to the spirit and voice of the book, while being a work of art in its own right."

Marjorie Baumgarten from The Austin Chronicle wrote, "Disturbing and grim in its portraits, Wise Blood is nevertheless marvelous storytelling and its performances are virtually divine." Time Out described the film as "Tragically, desperately funny" and called it "John Huston's best film for many years".

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Wise Blood holds a score of 88% based on 24 critic reviews, with an average rating of 7.4 out of 10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Director John Huston and author Flannery O'Connor prove a formidable creative match in Wise Blood, a gothic satire anchored by Brad Dourif's vinegary performance." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 84 out of 100 based on 16 critic reviews, indicating "critical acclaim".

In 2003, The New York Times placed the film on its Best 1000 Movies Ever list.