Wise Blood (film)

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, her grandfather Asa Hawks who is a conventional side-walk preacher; 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. Hoover Shoates is a promoter who wants to manage Hazel's career as a prophet while Hazel's landlady falls in love with him.[1]

The director of the film appears in several fantasy sequences as Hazel's grandfather.[1]

• Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes
• John Huston as Grandfather
• 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

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.[2]

The film premiered out of competition at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival in May 1979.[3] 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.[2] 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.[2]

At Cannes, the film received a mixed reception.[2] 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."[1] 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."[5]

As of March 2019, Wise Blood holds a rating of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes from 21 reviews.[6]

• Wise Blood on IMDb
• Wise Blood at Rotten Tomatoes