ETT LETTER: Hazel Motes no fraud

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There is an inaccuracy In Henry. Phillip's review of the film "Wise Blood" (Socie Press 190).

The film, begins with the hero, Hazel Motes, being demobbed and returning to his native area of America.

He visits his home, now derelict, and begins to be haunted by memories of his childhood. The most terrifying image is of his grandfather, a preacher.

In one flashback the child is so frightened by a sermon that he wets himself.

Motes does not return with the intention of starting a new church and this is where ede. Phillip's review is wrong. He only wants to live and do things he's never done before.

That is why he goes to a town and visits a prostitute who's address he finds written on a toilet wall.

But he cannot escape the grip of religion. The suit he chooses to buy, even the look in his, eyes, convince all who meet him that he is a preacherSO a preacher he becomes. The new church he starts is the "Church without Christ", where there is no Jesus to redeem your sins.

Each man and woman must confront the truth of their own life, no matter how sintul and disgusting that truth is. As comrade Phillips quotes-"the blind don't see and the lame don't walk, and what's dead stays that way.

What confronts Hazel Motes and eventually drives him to his death is not the truth, but the deceit, manipulation and profiteering that surrounds the fundamentalist sects in that part of America.

The film points to chilling parallels in real life, such as the mystifying growth of sects like the Moonies in America, and the recent suicide of a Jewish boy in Britain who was unable to cope with his conversion to the evangelical church.

The overriding impression left by the film is the power of religion and of the corruption that surrounds it.

Hazel Motes is not a fraud, as cde. Phillips remarks,- but a victim of these forces.

But on one point he is correct, Wise Blood is worth seeing at least once.

Fraternally, R.E., London