Picture John Huston’s characters walking: a British consul drunkenly ambling through the congested plazas and down the open boulevards of Mexico; dust-clad treasure-hunters climbing the hills of the Sierra Madre; an upstart, black-hatted preacher whose body moves along the sidewalks of Taulkinham, but whose piercing eyes are in another space and time. If for Max Ophuls, master of the elaborate dolly shot, movement reflects life, for Huston, movement reflects characters – his individualist men and the restlessness they feel as they tread their loner paths.
Adapted from a novel by Flannery O’Connor and released last year on DVD by the Criterion Collection, Wise Blood is an underappreciated gem in Huston’s oeuvre. In Southern Gothic style – replete with such grotesques as a beggar-conman feigning blindness, an obese whore, and a shrunken mummy – the film follows the existential crisis of Hazel Motes, a young army vet who arrives in the small southern American town of Taulkinham. Boyishly good looking with a thin physic, angular jaw and black top hat, Hazel is quickly mistaken for a preacher. Hazel seizes the opportunity, but the gospel he attempts to preach is neither a huckster’s plea for money (as is the word of others he encounters) nor the message of a Christian zealot. Instead, Hazel founds the Church Without Christ, unloading his theological baggage (which is partly elaborated through brief flashback dream sequences in which the young Hazel is subjected to the stern sermonizing of a terrifying elder) by denouncing Jesus as a liar and rejecting the idea that mankind needs redemption.
Restlessness, a theme so prevalent in Huston’s work, is a helpful concept for orienting one’s way around Wise Blood. As the story unfolds, Hazel’s fiery sermons and intense disbelief reveal themselves to be the Janus face of a puritanical Christianity whose stronghold Hazel cannot shake. Wise Blood’s profundity – and its insight into today’s fundamentalists, whether they be the partisans of religion or science (e.g., Ditchkins style atheists) – is in its suggestion that extreme belief and extreme disbelief are close as can be: both are manifestations of a psychological blocking off of deep and restless uncertainty.
by Ben Ewing | Source: The Criterion Collection DVD
12 Feb 2010 5:33 PM | Submit Comment
Elio Petri is pretty much a forgotten figure nowadays but in his day made enough of an impact to share a Grand Prix at Cannes for this and to win an Academy Award for his earlier Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. Like that, Working Class stars Gian Maria Volonté, who gives here the ultimate portrayal of Alienated Labour in a full-blooded performance that’s still subtle enough to show clearly how Volonté’s character, factory pieceworker Lulù Massa, is barely conscious of the degree of exploitation he’s suffering, even when the loss of a finger pushes him to radical action. Petri’s film is expressionistic, histrionic, cacophonous, in stylistic tune with Lulu himself as he is buffeted by the forces around him, the speeded-up production line of the factory floor, the oppressive supervisors, the conformist union officials, the solipsistic student radicals, literally hemmed in within the frame by the narrow confines of the apartment he shares with his partner and her young son. What’s wrong with this society is made abundantly clear but the film hardly offers much hope for change: when at the end of the film Lula retells his dream of workers knocking down the walls around them it’s stirring stuffÑexcept that his co-workers can barely hear him over the din of the factory. So, we’re rather left with the image that Petri repeats throughout of the workers, having passed through the factory gates, trudging down the long road, expanses of snow on either side, towards the factory buildings. That, presumably, is “Heaven”.
by Ian Johnston | Source: Medusa DVD
01 Feb 2010 7:51 PM | Comments (1)
