AT LAST - WISE BLOOD OUT ON DVD

At last it's happened, the long wait in the wilderness is over.  John Huston's satirical masterpiece Wise Blood has finally been released on DVD.

No longer will I and other admirers of this great film have to scour the Internet in search of grainy and truncated versions and suffer eye-strain and loss of patience and the feed dies or freezes. 

Restored to its former glory,  the DVD also features interviews with the main cast including Brad Dourif who gives the best performance of his life.  Despite the obvious talent of Dourif, he, like the film, has been lost in the wilderness some thirty years since its release in 1979.  Despite a scattering of roles in David Lynch films, an Oscar nomination for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and a memorable slot on the X-Files, his appearances have been too infrequent, his talent little utilised.  

That is until now.  He has appeared recently in Werner Herzog's Wild Blue Yonder and is pencilled in for two more of the great German director's forthcoming features.  About time too.

I'll let you into a secret. I'm a sucker for any story from the Deep South.  I think it all began when I read William Faulkner in my teens, first his short stories and then the novels including Absalom, Absalom and the Sound and the Fury.  The South is not a place it is more a state of mind. A primeval landscape  peopled by every eccentric imaginable and stories that are deeply Gothic and hysterical.   Honour sits squarely with racism, old world values, meanness and generosity, misguided loyalty, honour and red-neck justice all mix like a Bourbon mash with a dash of sourness at losing the  American Civil War. The American South is a heady mixture of the righteous and the venal at one and the same time, in one and the same person...  

Wise Blood has eccentrics a plenty and some.  A seemingly blind preacher, a belief that the motor car is a means of salvation above and beyond religion itself and the establishment of  the "Church of Christ Without Christ".   Based on Flannery O'Connor's debut novel, Huston's film is true to the writer's spirit.  Much of her peerless dialogue is lifted straight from the page.  Huston by this time was box-office poison and living the life of a recluse in Mexico.  He had been ill for some time and was uninsurable.  The film was not financed in America but relied on German investment in order for it to be made on a modest budget.   

Huston was an inspired choice of director and even has a cameo role as a fire-breathing preacher shown in flashback.  Look out also for Harry Dean Stanton as preacher Asa Hawks and his daughter Sabbath (Amy Wright).  All perfectly cast in this all too long-awaited film release.