John Huston often directed films about mad, lonely men (from fierce Captain Ahab in Moby Dick to the Humphrey Borgart twofer of The Treasure of Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon) while moonlighting as an actor playing monsters on screen (none greater than Noah Cross is Chinatown). Strange that the combination of those two things seems to be crazily overlooked in the case of Wise Blood (God bless Janus/Criterion for digging out this little cult gem), especially considering that the lonely and disturbed young man at the center of the film is brilliant character actor Brad Dourif.

Dourif plays Hazel Motes, a WWII veteran returned home with a few dollars in his pocket, no prospects and no family. All that remains of his childhood is the haunting scar tissue of his fire and brimstone preaching grandfather (yes, a villain of sorts played by the director) and a shriveled and abandoned piece of property in the middle of nowhere. With not a lot of intelligence, but a boatload of determination, Hazel is determined to “do something he never did before.” Dourif is a force of nature in this film, who at a young age (only a couple years past his Oscar Nomination for One Flew over The Cuckoo’s Nest) was not quite on the path of the character actor who would play super-creeps in such varied films as David Lynch’s Dune, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and HBO’s Deadwood (or Voice Chucky the maniacal puppet in the Child’s Play films). Nevertheless, he more than holds his own against three other character actor greats here: Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton and Amy Wright as they attempt to force his naive determined (yet lost) soul from his forward and somewhat nutty trajectory (forming the Church of Christ Without Christ) into compromise with their particular (and petty) religious huckster schemes.

This particular scene requires the above paragraph to set it up, as Motes’ impulsiveness, faith (of sorts) and determination (and eventual frustration) are all summed up in how he purchases a rotting Ford Fairlane from a crusty used car dealer. I love the way that the dealer simply picks up his son and throws him out of the way after the son tries to ‘play dad.’ Another eventual theme that comes out in the film. Motes makes two ‘escape attempts’ to get away from his strange life as a preacher in the Church of Christ without Christ, and John Ford (well really Flannery O’Connor, the author of the book Wise Blood is adapted from) uses the ‘open road,’ a common metaphor for freedom and re-invention in American Cinema (and literature, I suppose) as an ironic bit of fatalism. The final ‘breakdown’ of the car rests on the incline of a steep hill whereupon a hellfire passage of Jesus graffiti further suggests that Motes is not getting away from either religion or his fathers legacy. Oh, did I mention that it is funny? That’s Southern humour for y’all.