John Huston directed this great Southern gothic film based on the Flannery O'Connor novel. Brad Dourif is absolutely at his best as Hazel Motes the protagonist of the film and novel. John Huston also appears as a preacher.

Hazel gets out of the army after WWII and comes home. He is a person in religious crisis. He sneers at communal and social experiences of Christianity, sees the followers of itinerant, Protestant preachers as fools, and sets out to deny Christ as violently as he can.

He forms a new church, the "Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ Crucified."

He denies the existence of the soul.

He starts preaching and the film moves along with his interaction with various characters. In a typical Flannery O'Connor grotesque device, at the end of the movie, Hazel blinds himself as a figure of redemption.

The movie has many comic moments, but all in all, is a satire and indictment on the Southern do-it-yourself religion that is so common today.

Marvelous film, every bit as good as the book.  Flannery O'Connor is one of my favorite American writers.  She was a Catholic, and all of her work has a strong ethical/moral theme related to her religious belief.  Hazel's blinding himself at the end is a hilarious ironic parallel with Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus -- as in Sophocles, Oedipus blinds himself for seeing the terrible truth that he has killed his father and has been sleeping with his mother, in Wise Blood Hazel metaphorically has murdered his Father and been screwing his mother as well -- the Church.  It's a very rich movie, and I need to see it again.