Cinema: Gothic Legend

“Credulity,” Charles Lamb observed, “is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.” The principal ingredient of The Fool Killer is false belief—in the evanescent ghosts of folklore that are part of a boy’s education and a grownup’s destruction.

In the post-Civil War Midwest, a twelve-year-old orphan named George (Edward Albert) runs away from his guardians. His life takes on a Huckleberry hue, and a series of encounters leads him to the beginning of maturity. His first is with Dirty Jim (Henry Hull), an unregenerate old buzzard who prattles of “a fool killer,” who poleaxes wrongdoers as they sleep. The figure haunts George’s dreams until he actually finds him in the person of another fugitive: Milo Bogardus (Anthony Perkins).

Other men have lost their lives in the Civil War; Milo has lost his identity. He remembers nothing that happened before his war injury. Now, fearful and gullible, he traverses the countryside, a figure as lean and dangerous as the bowie knife he carries on his hip. When the two wanderers attend a fundamentalist camp meeting, George joins the screaming sinners who gather at the preacher’s feet. The next morning the preacher is found hacked to death and Milo has vanished. George pushes on to a new town and eventually to a new home. But he knows that he has not seen the last of his friend. When Milo returns, it is as the fool killer, axe in hand, prepared to fulfill the prophecy of Dirty Jim’s legend.

Technically, the film is little more than primitive art. Made in 1964, it was withheld during a five-year battle between co-producers. The slow dissolves, the gross use of filters to turn day into night, are rarely used today. Moreover, the local color is often put in by rote, as when Milo philosophizes, “Cities ‘n’ houses . . . come between us ‘n’ God,” or when George addresses the camera in an arch epilogue. Yet The Fool Killer remains valid for two reasons. In its picaresque exploration of a naive, vanished America, it meanders into the Twain tradition of American fiction. And in its stinging exploration of God-haunted gothic territory, it demonstrates that no ethnic group has ever had an exclusive hold on guilt.