True story of the mass murder of a family in Holcomb, Kansas, killed in their home late one night by a pair of two-bit hoods looking for a non-existent safe, which rocks the small rural community. Writer-director Richard Brooks pulls out all the stops with this screen-version of Truman Capote's fictionalized tome. It's a good-looking picture moodily photographed by Conrad Hall that often calls attention to itself because of its crystalline black-and-white images. Take away that vivid look and the new-fangled language and what you have is a '50s-styled melodrama, undermined by both jangling hyperbole and moralistic pandering (and topped with some Bible-quoting and finger-wagging). Brooks pummels away at the sordidness inherent in his exposition, yet allows the killers (well-played by Scott Wilson and Robert Blake) to emote and sound off--to become "human"--barely avoiding the literary, built-in apologia for their behavior (they were thrown away by society!). The movie is one-part crime case and another part queasy drama, with the murders detailed in an appropriately disturbing fashion just shy of feeling exploitative. The performances are solid, and Brooks is deft at skidding along the edges of 1967 permissiveness, but there's something about dramatizing this case which doesn't quite work (neither here nor in Capote's book): by giving up so much time to the killers, probing their minds and so forth, too much depth is attributed to two soulless murderers. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker noted the killers no longer run over the dog with their car as they did in the book, the point being this (not the murders of the family) might have killed off our interest in the pair as characters. Four Oscar nominations, including Brooks for both Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. ** from ****
Review of In Cold Blood
