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"It's not exactly my book but it's a hell of a movie."
- Truman Capote
Based on Truman Capote's controversial best-selling 'non-fiction' portrayal of two apparently unmotivated killers and their arbitrarily committed crime, In Cold Blood, was widely misunderstood on its original release in 1967, but has since been recognised as something of a cult classic.
Richard Brooks' film inscribes onto the screen a vividly bleak work that shines with desolate malignancy and an almost sensual sense of inevitable tragedy. Recounting the tale of Perry Smith (Robert Blake) and Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson), a pair of Kansas drifters who in the course of a petty burglary murder a family of four, Brooks' psycho-docu-drama quickly establishes and steadily builds an overwhelming mood of menace and desperation. Contributing to this atmosphere is the chilling, evocative score by Quincy Jones and Conrad Hall's rich, measured black and white cinematography (justly celebrated in last year's Visions Of Light). As well as painting a stark picture of the ravaged underbelly of rural Midwestern America in the late 1950s, Brooks' film is a finely detailed character study that ultimately finds its pathos in the fate of the killers, not the unsuspecting family. This is perhaps the key to the film's disturbing emotional stasis and the reason behind its initial equivocal reception. To witness this world of squalid small towns, rundown hotels, and truckstop cafes unfold on the wide canvas of the luminous Cinemascope screen is not an experience easily forgotten.