JOHN HUSTON'S Wise Blood, adapted from Flannery O'Connor's first novel, proves that a spirited story, a lighthearted screenplay and subtle direction can bring a major piece of fiction--Southern fiction--to the screen. Rarely have great pieces of literature been successfully translated into cinematic terms, but Huston and screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald '71 have captured the difficult, often oblique essence of O'Connor's work on film.

The blessing and the mystery of Wise Blood is that it deftly avoids any established category. It is weird. Huston paces his film like a front porch tale-teller sliding through the story with a quiet drawl but leaps out of his rocker to flare with hellfire often enough to keep us nervous, wide-eyed and fascinated.

O'Connor's comi-tragic novella concerns one Hazel Motes, the son of a preacher, a young, little-educated Southerner confused about religion. Haze is a preacher, too, but not of any church of Christ. In a South obsessed with Jesus--JESUS SAVES smothers him in neon and print--he tries to rebel by founding his own Church Without Christ and immersing himself in sin. His is a church where "the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way." He is humorless in a crazy world, aiming with violent integrity to keep Jesus Christ from controlling his life but simultaneously embracing the guidance--positive or negative--that Jesus offers him. It is a deeply religious story, wryly tragic and depressingly comic as Haze unsuccessfully probes for the path to eternal damnation.

Fitzgerald's screenplay draws directly on O'Connor's novella, using much of her original dialogue, which is both realistically harsh and softly poetic. And all of the book's strange characters are faithfully recreated: Asa Hawks, the failed preacher disguised as a blind man who begs and steals in the name of Jesus; Sabbath Hawks, his sluttish daughter who falls for Haze; Enoch Emery, the idiot teenage zookeeper who finds a bizarre solution to Haze's search for a new Jesus; Hoover Shoats, the mercenary street preacher who seizes on Haze's Church Without Christ as an exciting new way to fill his coffers; and Leora Watts, the whore who gives Haze his first bed when he arrives in the big city.

It is a bizarre collection of characters, truly worthy of O'Connor, whose novella magically integrates the commonplace and the violent. But without the superb cast assembled by Huston and Fitzgerald, Wise Blood might have been as lifeless as Haze's Church Without Christ. Instead, the cast brings to the screen and earnestness we expect only of top-rank stage actors. There are no holes, no weak links, only simple excellence.

Amy Wright's Sabbath Hawks moves like a tetched possum trying to seduce a wolfhound. Wright was the dippy lesbian in Girlfriends and she gives Sabbath a similar flightiness, the nervous soul of a girl who revels in sex and sin. Harry Dean Stanton is properly menacing as the conniving Asa Hawks who wants to torture Haze in a fraudulent game of redemption. Daniel Shor fusses and leaps about hilariously in an ape suit as the deranged Enoch Emery, whose new Jesus is a shrunken South American mummy stolen indiscreetly from the city MVSEVM. And Ned Beatty, the only "name" in the cast, appears fleetingly as the entrepreneurial Hoover Shoats.

But Wise Blood belongs to Huston and his star, Brad Dourif as Haze. Dourif was the stuttering Billy Bibbitt of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; he looks like a crazed Don Knotts. His eyes contort wildly, glaring unnervingly, distracting from his rigid nose and hard, flat mouth. Dourif's Haze is grotesque, a little man possessed by a shady demon. He believes in his Church Without Christ not with his soul--which is undeniably Christian--but with his body. It shakes with evangelical passion, with barely controlled violent passion capable of murder. And in an ultimate renouncement of Jesus, Haze is incapable of love.

WE SEEM to have passed the anti-hero phase in Hollywood. Dustin Hoffman has abandoned Benjamin Braddock and Ratso Rizzo for Ted Kramer. Even in "B" films like American Gigolo, the misfit hero is not glorified for his sins at the finale but redeemed, primped for "normal" society. But Wise Blood is not a Hollywood film, nor is it about normal society. In Huston's hands, Hazel Motes becomes not a hero or an anti-hero but a non-hero, one of us living out the internal battle between Jesus and Satan.

The most remarkable aspect of the film is the simple way Huston and Fitzgerald have translated O'Connor's work to the screen. It works as if the novella had been the treatment for a screenplay. Like O'Connor, they make these characters seem natural when, in fact, they are grossly unnatural. When Haze wraps himself in barbed wire, a sequence that is at first horrifying becomes tender and comic because these characters really breathe, bleed and smile. Fitzgerald even allows some of O'Connor's imagery to creep into the dialogue when Enoch describes a woman with "hair so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull."

These insane characters have what Enoch calls "wise blood." It is a feeling inside about the right way to live, about the right way to be crazy and religious in a crazy and religious world. At 73, Huston may not be crazy or religious but his blood is still the right type; he has chosen an eccentric, powerful work with which to launch his welcome comeback as a director.