"I suppose a book like mine attracts all the lunatics" (Flannery O'Connor). "The strange saga of Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), in Flannery O'Connor's words, a 'Christian malgré lui, and his misadventures as he preaches "the Church Without Christ,"' seems made to order for John Huston's vital pessimism and defeatism as a director....Brad Dourif is so unattractively eccentric in demeanor that he is something of an aesthetic burden as the main protagonist. With less to do, Daniel Sher as the volubly lonely Enoch Emery, Amy Wright as the uncanny child-Eve Sabbath Lily, Harry Dean Stanton as her bogus preacher-father, Mary Nell Santacroce as a weirdly possessive landlady, and John Huston as the remembered preacher-grandfather, become memorable manifestations of humanity's groping for meaning and feeling in a hideously inhospitable world....One cannot fake a project like this. The great excitement of Wise Blood is that, in his thirty-third film, Huston has felt this material down to his bones, and has communicated this feeling admirably." (Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, 10/79)