John Huston is clearly a survivor, and … Wise Blood provides ample evidence that he has outlasted every movie mogul who ever tried to sweeten the sourness and pessimism in Huston's personality…. Admirers of the late Flannery O'Connor may have strong reservations about Huston's direction and Benedict Fitzgerald's screenplay. Actually, Huston and Fitzgerald have softened the novel's unbearably bleak ending ever so slightly, but most of the pain and suffering and excruciating guilt have been retained.

I respect the film enormously, but I don't have the slightest desire ever to see it again. Yet I think every thoughtful person should see Wise Blood once if only to experience a profound and original depression….

There are incongruities in the Southern milieu …, little vaguenesses and lacunae that occur in the transition between the controlled coherence of the printed page and the haphazard details of uncoordinated location shooting. Nonetheless, there is something...