[HENRY PHILLIPS reviews John Huston's "Wise Blood" (now…]

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HENRY PHILLIPS reviews John Huston's "Wise Blood" (now showing in London).

Find edition of the opposition documents ited inside the WRP by the present leader. ship of the Workers Socialist League Price £2.50 plus 20p postage and package from £2.50 plus 20p postage and package BM Box 5277, London WC1V 6XX The man who among the 40 odd films he has directed can include such masterpieces as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The African Queen and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre obviously occupies • These were the achieve: ments of John Huston's early years as a Hollywood director from 1941 to 1952.

For the next twenty years, despite an astonishingly full career as director, screen-writer and actor, Huston was unable to match this early achievement.

Epics like Moby Dick and The Bible proved too big for him, even though they contain some brilliant moments.

Even a very minor film like The List of Adrian Messenger contain a few images (like the peeling off of a rubber mask from the face of the main character) which are as memorable as a recurring nightmare.

Genius

But in the 50s and 60s Huston was no more than a very good Hollywood director; in the 40s he had been one of cinema's great geniuses.

Not many directors have been able to make a comeback but Huston is one.

Late in his career (he is now 74) he has shown that the brilliance he displayed in his early career never left him.

Long after most critics put him on the scrap heap he has started making a series of films which must make him one of the great directors not only of the 40s and 50s but also of the 70s and perhaps, hopefully, the 80s too.

The two best , of films are Fat City (1975) and Wise Blood (now showing in London at the Camden Plaza).

Wise Blood is the story (though that's almost too strong a word) of Hazel Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes Motes, a scrawny : young Southerner returned from the image of his hell fire preacher grandfather (wonderfully overacted by Huston himself) cynically founds the Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ.

The film is based on the novel written in the 1950s Southern writer who died tragically of a generic disease at the height of her writing career.

To judge from Wise Blood she had much in common in her humour and unsentimental realism with her much more prolific contemporary, the great novelist William Faulkner. • The form . of Hazel Motes' preaching in Wise Blood is the same apparently possessed hysteria as the fundamentalist Christians.

No sin Only the content is, coincidentally, the opposite. In the Church of . Truth without Christ anything goes-there is no sin (to prove it, Motes consorts with a huge engulfing prostitute and nonchalantly murders a rival "prophet"').

"I'm a preacher", , Hazel boasts 'of the Church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and the dead stay that way"

And compared with the hell-fire terrors of his grandfather and his rivals that message is almost a comfort:

The narrative of this film is not so important for itself as for the way it introduces a series of vivid, eccentric, fascinating and for the most part repulsive characters: Asa Hawks, the "blind" preacher whose fraud Hazel exposes; his "daughter" who becomes possessed with lust for Hazel; Hoover Shoates, the confidence trickster who forms the rival Church of Christ without Christ; Enoch Emery, the youth who becomes Hazel's disciple but who gets it all wrong by stealing a shrunken "god" from the local museum and whose devotion Hazel treats with contempt; and Mrs Flood, the landlady who, after Hazel blinds himself, clings to him in pathetic dependence.

Extraordinary

And through it all goes the extraordinary character of Hazel Motes himselt-a fraua who is passionately convinced of the justice of his own fraudulent cause and dedicated to exposing the faults and dishonesty of others.

While Asa Hawks had pretended, for publicity, to blind himself, Hazel does it really,: and he commits suicide by tying himself tight with barbed wire and then finally going out into a torrential rainstorm and dying of exposure.

His only faith is in his old and inefficient motor for Secı prese Workers Socialist League Box 5277, London WCIV car.

Huston's and O'Connor's world is a grim and deeply pessimistic one.

There is no love, no science, no honesty-only desperate dependence, lust, lies, fraud, delusion and sloth.

Huston managed to make such a bleak disnal world both very humourous and chillingly convincing. And he does it without a trace of sentimentality or cheapness.

This vision of quiet barbarism in super-developed capitalist America does not pretend to offer any hope of change or escape. It shows only an inexorable journey to perdition.

But it is an artistic triumph. Go and see it, it is one of the best films ever made by John Huston. And that means it is one of the best films ever made. With a new introduction

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