Word: screenplay
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JOHN HUSTON'S Wise Blood, adapted from Flannery O'Connor's first novel, proves that a spirited story, a lighthearted screenplay and subtle direction can bring a major piece of fiction--Southern fiction--to the screen. Rarely have great pieces of literature been successfully translated into cinematic terms, but Huston and screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald '71 have captured the difficult, often oblique essence of O'Connor's work on film...
Fitzgerald's screenplay draws directly on O'Connor's novella, using much of her original dialogue, which is both realistically harsh and softly poetic. And all of the book's strange characters are faithfully recreated: Asa Hawks, the failed preacher disguised as a blind man who begs and steals in the name of Jesus; Sabbath Hawks, his sluttish daughter who falls for Haze; Enoch Emery, the idiot teenage zookeeper who finds a bizarre solution to Haze's search for a new Jesus; Hoover Shoats, the mercenary street preacher who seizes on Haze's Church Without Christ as an exciting...
...most remarkable aspect of the film is the simple way Huston and Fitzgerald have translated O'Connor's work to the screen. It works as if the novella had been the treatment for a screenplay. Like O'Connor, they make these characters seem natural when, in fact, they are grossly unnatural. When Haze wraps himself in barbed wire, a sequence that is at first horrifying becomes tender and comic because these characters really breathe, bleed and smile. Fitzgerald even allows some of O'Connor's imagery to creep into the dialogue when Enoch describes a woman with "hair so thin...
...Screenplay by Kimi Peck and Dalene Young...
...Screenplay by Joseph Wambaugh...