John Huston directed this film version of O'Connor's first novel. It is a haunting portrayal of a spiritually bankrupt preacher. Its twisted plot and grotesque characters are classic O'Connor.
This film was written by Horton Foote, who also wrote the Academy Award-winning adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird, the novel by O'Connor's fellow Southerner Harper Lee. It is an adaptation of an O'Connor short story about a Polish immigrant who causes havoc on a Georgia farm in the 1940s. It stars a young Samuel L. Jackson.
Actor/director Tommy Lee Jones is a huge fan of O'Connor's; Jones even wrote his undergraduate honors thesis at Harvard about her. Jones has said in interviews that O'Connor's method of storytelling was a major inspiration for him in this film, which was his directorial debut.
Flannery O'Connor is among the many writers who agreed to sell the film rights to their work and who were subsequently horrified by the results. This episode of the 1950s television series "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars" (the name says it all) used the plot of one of O'Connor's best known stories, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." "A story I sold [will star] a tap-dancer," O'Connor wrote of the movie, "the punishment always fits the crime."