DVD/150: IN COLD BLOOD (Richard Brooks, 1967)

In 1967 two films fueled debate about depecting true crime onscreen, do you make the killers sympathetic and cool (BONNIE AND CLYDE) or use brutal realism (IN COLD BLOOD)?  While BONNIE had a bigger effect culturally, BLOOD remains more unsettling, for several reasons.

In November 1959, ex-convicts Richard Hickok and Perry Smith drove 400 miles to rural Holcomb, Kansas to farmer Herbert Cutler's isolated home after hearing he kept $10,000 in a safe.  Once inside they discovered they were wrong, so in anger they shot Cutler, his wife and teenage son and daughter.

By the time they were arrested six weeks later, Truman Capote had travelled to Holcomb and started writing his groundbreaking IN COLD BLOOD, it's publication delayed by the six year wait for their appeals and eventual hanging.

Columbia wanted Paul Newman and Robert Redford but Brooks wanted relative unknowns so cast Robert Blake and Scott Wilson.

Shelf or charity shop?  Shelf.  Richard Brooks bought the film rights swiftly after the book's publication and adapted it himself.  As I said above, he was determined to make the film he wanted to make which led to tensions on the set.  The result however has lost none of it's grim power and it's interesting that while BONNIE AND CLYDE has a relatively standard style, IN COLD BLOOD is unafraid to use flashbacks and dream sequences in it's non-linear documentary narrative.  The odd thng is that Brooks substituted Capote into a character called The Reporter who remains anonymous through the film, until becoming the narrator of the judicial killing of Smith and Hickok.  Brooks' unrelenting pressure-cooker atmosphere is achieved through the haunting b/w cinematography of Conrad Hall, the whiplash editing of Peter Zinner and Quincy Jones' discordant jazz score. Brooks filmed in the real locations - apart from the prison - including in the actual house where the murders took place.  They filmed there for four weeks and one can only imagine how that affected all concerned; I must admit I find all these scenes to be queasy and deeply uncomfortable.