Review of In Cold Blood (1967) by Keith C — 04 Aug 2009

The biggest mistake I made in finally watching the classic IN COLD BLOOD was watching it within hours of finishing the book, thus turning what I knew was a highly-praised crime thriller from the late 60s into yet another example in the classic story of "the movie never lives up to the book." So my first inclination was to basically dismiss the movie. I wasn't sure that it had anything to offer someone who read the book, so faithful as it is to Truman Capote's masterpiece.

For this movie, I thought I'd play a game of "three up, three down." Here are the three main reasons why the movie IN COLD BLOOD is worth your time, folowed by three reasons why it just can't measure up to the book:

1. Conrad Hall's cinematography. His name was the first that jumped out as I began watching...the master who passed away after the one-two punch of "American Beauty" and "Road to Perdition" after a long list of Oscar-nominated work behind the camera. The scene where rain on a window reflects on Robert Blake's face as tears is something that even non-cinemaphiles would notice.

2. Robert Blake and Scott Wilson. Both men just LOOK like your vision of Perry and Dick when you read Capote's book. They are pathetic enough, yet handsome enough. Obscure enough, yet wild enough. They're pitch perfect. Maybe one of the reasons why I thought the film wasn't adding anything to the experience was because these two were almost exactly what I had created in my head for these killers.

3. The Clutter family house. I did not know this when I was watching, but I found out that they filmed this movie in the actual house where the Clutter family was murdered. How creepy! That instantly made me appreciate the film more. You'd never get permission to do something like that today! Robert Blake said that it was important to not be "too Hollywood" about the film by making it somewhere else. To be watching and know that the place where the actors were tied up and killed was actually where it happened gives one a chill that few crime movies can muster.

And, in fairness, here are three reasons why the film falls short of greatness:

1. A voice-over/narrator comes in toward the end. I think it's supposed to be like the voice of Capote. It's not needed. It sends the film off in a different direction than it was going. And it's out of joint with everything else. I took that as a sign of weakness in tidying up the film that the director felt that was needed. It complicated what was otherwise a sparsely-told and filmed story.

2. That age old problem of pared-down character development from page to screen causes us to lose a lot of the complexity of the two men. I know this is to be expected, but it is at the expense of things like Dick's pedophelia and Perry's old Army buddy, who tries to remain his friend.

3. I didn't feel like there was a lot of artistry in the translation, short of moments of Hall's camera brilliance. With the exception of the trick of Perry seeing his father's face in others (a way of stylizing for the audience the notion that Perry comes from a violent past), everything else in the film is as literally lifted from the book as possible. Consequently, once you've read the book, there's less of a reason to watch the film. There's not much of a creative spin put on the material.

I was disappointed in the virtual skipping over of the court proceedings, one of the best sections of the book. And I was also miffed by the toning down of racial prejudice from book to film, but I suspect that was the sacrifice made in 1967 to get it made. Having said that, I give IN COLD BLOOD a qualified thumbs-up as a classic film worth seeing. But nowhere near as good as the Truman Capote book!