In Cold Blood ***** (1967, Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe, Jeff Corey, Paul Stewart, Will Geer) – Classic Movie Review 2874

Writer-director Richard Brooks’s gruelling 1967 movie version of Truman Capote’s 1966 bestselling true-crime ‘non-fiction novel’ about the brutal, senseless murder of a family in rural Kansas is extremely gripping, authentic and realistic, but also thankfully avoids seeming to be exploitative. In Cold Blood was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director, Screenplay, Cinematography and Score but there were no wins.

Shot in the same house, courtroom and penitentiary that were splashed across front pages less than a decade earlier – even featuring six jurors from the trial itself – this nightmare film noir is a haunted journey inside an atrocity that entered the American nation’s psyche.

Brooks’s long (134 minutes) and complex screenplay offers strong, inspired acting roles for Robert Blake and Scott Wilson as ex-cons on parole Dick Hickock (Wilson) and Perry Smith (Blake), who murdered four members of a farming family in Kansas in 1959.

[Spoiler alert] The manipulating Hickock plans a robbery based on information from his fellow inmate Floyd Wells about $10,000 cash locked in a safe hidden in the home of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas. Hickock re-unites with his old prison buddy Smith in Kansas City, intending to cash in on the tip.

Though oddly charismatic, they are both very disturbed individuals with deep father issues. Hickock repeatedly calls Smith ‘honey’ and other endearments, and they share a peculiar, aggressively close relationship. Smith gets jealous when Hickock has sex with women, even saying it’s OK for him to watch.

They’re to hit the Clutter farmhouse and take the $10,000 hidden in Herbert Clutter’s safe. But the botched robbery does not go to plan. To leave no witnesses, the pair bind, gag and execute Herbert Clutter (John McLiam), his wife Bonnie (Ruth Storey) and their teenage children Nancy (Brenda C Currin) and Kenyon (Paul Hough). They come away from the home with only $42 and go on the run to try to elude the police.

The movie follows the planning of the premeditated crime, the story of the break-in and murders, the getaway, the search for Smith and Hickock, their interrogation, their trial and their execution. However, though it appears to offer a conventional narrative, it actually tells the story in impressionist, non-linear way, jumbling timelines, points of view and levels of authenticity. This is extraordinarily sophisticated.

The police are all portrayed sympathetically as strong, resolute, painstaking and patient. The leader of the investigation, Alvin Dewey, is shown as a melancholy, thoughtful, intelligent, fair man. The cops’ break comes weeks after the killings when Floyd Wells, in exchange for a newspaper reward and a reduced prison sentence, calls to say he remembers telling Hickock about the Clutters for whom he had worked as a hired hand 10 years ago before his arrest for armed robbery. 

Proceeding in documentary thriller style, Brooks holds his movie firm and steady and keeping the audience’s mind concentrated on the characters and the question of why the killers did what they did. Also notable in the cast are John Forsythe as Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, Paul Stewart as a newsman reporter Jensen, and Will Geer as the Bible-bashing prosecuting attorney demanding the death penalty.

After finally showing their sickening crimes in detail, in an extended, much delayed sequence, the film still seems to want to be sympathetic to the plight of the two killers. It makes us want them to get away from the police, and certainly to evade the gallows, partly by showing the way they became who they were in such detail and partly by mythologising them and glamourising them like in Bonnie and Clyde.

The movie condemns the crimes but forgives the killers, makes the prosecutor into a vengeance-seeking villain, and spends a lot of time with the killers as they wait five years on Death Row, and a lot of time with the sickening details of their state judicial ‘revenge’ murders by hanging. This is queasy stuff, not the stuff of your average thriller. There is humour in In Cold Blood, but it is black humour, rising out of character and situation

Conrad L Hall’s black and white widescreen noir cinematography and Quincy Jones’s jazz music score are striking major contributions to a distinguished movie. It’s perhaps not unusual to praise a film’s cinematography and score, but these are extraordinary, elevating the film to the status of art work.

However, just why it’s so formally beautiful as this raises issues. Perhaps a much plainer, hand-held, documentary style of filming with no music except natural sounds would be more appropriate to this shocking real story. However, Brooks is trying to emulate Capote, by turning the true story into art. And he succeeds.

Also in the cast are Jeff Corey as Dick’s dad Mr Hickok, Gerald S O’Loughlin as Harold Nye, John Gallaudet, James Flavin, Charles McGraw, Jim Lantz, Duke Hobbie, Sheldon Allman, Vaughn Taylor, Sammy Thurman, Sadie Truitt, Myrtle Clare, Teddy Eccles, Raymond Hatton, Mary-Linda Rapelye, Ronda Fultz, Al Christy, Don Sollars, Harriet Levitt and Stan Levitt.

Nancy Clutter’s horse Babe was used in a few scenes and the actual gallows at the Kansas State Penitentiary was used for filming the executions.

Now restored in 4K, this true American horror story was premiered at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival and returned to UK cinemas from 11 September 2015, opening at BFI Southbank and selected cinemas nationwide.

In Cold Blood was remade as a TV movie in 1996. Capote (2005) tells the story of the writing of the book, featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Best Actor Oscar-winning role. And Toby Jones plays Capote in Infamous (2006).

RIP Scott Wilson, star of In Cold Blood, who died on 6 October 2018, aged 76. His career took off after being discovered by director Norman Jewison, who cast him in his debut as murder suspect Harvey Oberst in In the Heat of the Night (1967).

RIP Robert Blake (born Michael James Vincenzo Gubitosi; September 18, 1933 – March 9, 2023) best known for the 1967 film In Cold Blood and the 1970s US TV series Baretta. He started as an MGM child actor and continued acting until 1997’s Lost Highway.

http://derekwinnert.com/capote-2005-philip-seymour-hoffman-classic-film-review-796/

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2874

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com