Wise Blood (Huston, 1979): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.55pm
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on September 19th, is part of the Harry Dean Stanton season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Along with The Man Who Would Be King and The Dead, this is
arguably John Huston's best literary adaptation, and conceivably his
very best film—a very close rendering of Flannery O'Connor's remarkable
first novel about a crazed southern cracker (a perfectly cast Brad
Dourif) who sets out to preach a “church without Christ,” and winds up
suffering a true Christian martyrdom in spite of himself. The period,
local ambience, and O'Connor's deadly gallows humor are all perfectly
caught, and apart from the subtle if highly pertinent fact that this is
an unbeliever's version of a believer's novel, it's about as faithful a
version of O'Connor's grotesque world as one could ever hope to get on
film, hilarious and frightening in equal measure. O'Connor conceived her
novel as a parody of existentialism, and Huston's own links with
existentialism—as the director of the first U.S. stage production of No Exit, as well as Sartre's Freud
script—make him an able interpreter. With Harry Dean Stanton, Amy
Wright, Daniel Shor, Ned Beatty, and Huston himself as the hero's
fire-and-brimstone grandfather. The producer is Michael Fitzgerald,
whose family's friendship with O'Connor guaranteed the fidelity and
seriousness of the undertaking.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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