John Huston’s Wise Blood very nearly does justice to Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, on which it is based. Though the novel may be Miss O’Connor’s least successful fiction, for a movie to have captured its spirit is enough to place it quite high on the film scale, and in a category of its own. In November 1963, after Albee’s adaptation of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe reached Broadway, Miss O’Connor wrote to a friend: “Did you ever consider Wise Blood as a possibility for dramatizing? If the times were different I would suggest that, but I think it would just be taken for the super-grotesque sub-Carson McCullers sort of thing 1 could not stand the sight or sound of.” There is something unfortunately McCullersish about the novel itself (the real, great O’Connor was to come later) and so about the movie.
Yet this tale of Hazel Motes, the preacher’s son who tries every way to escape Jesus and cannot, has much of the funny awfulness of Flannery O’Connor’s best works, dealing with the phenomena that once almost blanketed the South and still thrive in many a not so isolated pocket. In a somewhat different, less extreme form, they may indeed lurk in human nature everywhere. Wise Blood is the credo quia absurdum justified by all those absurd poor-white Southern lives: if being is so absurd, why shouldn’t belief, and the truth itself, be likewise? This is also, as it were, a prose version of “The Hound of Heaven,” with Christ relentlessly tracking down the would-be sinner protagonist until he dies as a martyred quasisaint. It is all horrible and funny, with the horror and funniness in a stranglehold so tight that they take even the audience’s breath away. And it is so outrageous you have to believe it; something so crazy, tormented, pitiful has to be beyond anyone’s ability to invent.
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