In Cold Blood
Studio: Criterion
Nov 23, 2015 Web Exclusive
Late in the evening of November 14th, 1959, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith—both former prisoners of Kansas State Prison—entered the home of farmer Herbert Clutter and his family, looking for a safe that purportedly contained more than $10,000. Finding no such stash of cash in the house, Hickock and Smith kill all four family members who were present in the home, and left with less than $50 in loose currency. After six weeks on the lam, the duo was arrested in Las Vegas and put on trial. They were convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged following nearly five years of appeals.
Their senseless crime formed the basis of Truman Capote’s famous, 1966 “non-fiction novel,” In Cold Blood. Capote spent half a decade researching his book, spending time in Holcomb, Kansas—where the murders took place—and extensively interviewing Hickock and Smith as they sat on death row. The book was a bestseller and sent benchmarks in the true crime field. One year later, filmmaker Richard Brooks (Blackboard Jungle) adapted the book into a commendably faithful screen version that went on to receive four Academy Award nominations.
Brooks’ In Cold Blood stars Scott Wilson as Hickock and Robert Blake as Smith (which itself adds a new, morbid layer that’s unlikely to be lost on today’s viewers.) Their performances are masterfully faceted, pulling off the near-impossible task of making cold-blooded killers almost affable, or at least sympathetic. The stark, black and white cinematography by Conrad Hall adds to the movie’s realism, and Quincy Jones’ jazz score heightens the movie’s more frantic stretches. The most blood-chilling detail, however, is that many of the film’s locations are real, including the Clutter house—the film crew rented out the family’s former home just six years after their deaths, to recreate the night’s events in the same rooms where they actually occurred. (Another morbid, real-life location: the outbuilding at the Kansas State Penitentiary containing the gallows where the two men were hanged.)
Criterion’s Blu-ray offers a high-quality presentation and a wealth of extra features that provide additional context. It’s a fairly even split between new and archival materials, with the new pieces being interviews with scholars and historians that focus in-depth on the movie’s editing, cinematography, and score, and an additional piece on Richard Brooks’ work. Among the older inclusions are a 1988 talk show interview with Brooks, and three Capote-focuses features: a visit to Holcomb taped for an NBC news segment after the release of In Cold Blood, an interview by Barbara Walters which followed the release of the film version in 1967, and a full Maysles Brother mini-documentary on Capote shot in 1966, titled With Love from Truman. It’s a fantastic set of bonus materials, even by Criterion’s own standards, and comes with our highest recommendation.
www.criterion.com/films/28788-in-cold-blood
Author rating: 9/10
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