Ogosmith
Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
Marva-nova
Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.
Sarita Rafferty
There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.
Hitchcoc
Don't watch this alone on a dark night. I had to remind myself as I watched this the first time that the men I was seeing commit a horrible series of murders were not the real ones. Robert Blake, who is scary in his own right, and Scott Wilson are the actors, but we really lose sight of that. Based on Truman Capote's biographical novel, this is the story of a couple of lost souls who arrive at a home, hoping to rob it, find the family home, and kill everyone. They get in too deep and can't leave any witnesses. It doesn't take long to capture them and the bulk of the movie involves what it's like as they await their executions. There is nothing sugar coated about this. They await hanging for a deplorable crime. What is interesting is that we see these men as human beings. They are not victims, but they have had checkered lives and have not figured out how to live properly. If you want another view of this, see the movie "Capote." It gives even further insights into the psyches of these guys.
inspectors71
To entertain or to inform? Aristotle's Six Parts of Drama would answer with, to make one think. Ask me, and you'll get, to wrap the audience up tightly with a good story, well told. My wife would be the entertainment voter. I think we're all right.Richard Brooks' film version of the Truman Capote book isn't by any stretch of the word, entertaining. That leaves us with wrapping up the viewer with a thought-provoking story. I remember seeing bits and pieces of In Cold Blood as a teen when it was shown on CBS. I couldn't get the idea through my head why two stupid criminals would slaughter a family for any reason that made sense. I knew I wasn't getting the point, even though I had made it past the concrete- operational period in my intellectual development. My life experiences hadn't told me about the random barbarism humans could inflict on each other. I was blessedly innocent, even though I understood why a bunch of soldiers had decimated a couple of villages in Vietnam in 1968 (venting their frustration on less-than-humans) and why four kids got gunned down at Kent State (weekend warriors who panicked). But butchering four innocents in a farm house, just for a couple bucks, simply didn't add up. To be honest, it still doesn't.Jump forward to seeing Brooks' The Professionals in a theatre during the winter of 1975 (with the premiere of his Bite the Bullet), and the scene, where Jack Palance's banditos systematically execute dozens of Mexican soldiers, left me wondering why, why do such a monstrous thing?I remember sitting there in that theatre and figuring it out, getting the answer to my question. Why My Lai? Why the Clutters? Why this or that massacre?Convenience. Lives are expendable for expedience' sake. And that is why Aristotle would understand In Cold Blood. I understand the story. My wife would too, but she would be so sickened by the subject and so perturbed by the idea of not being entertained by a medium that is supposed to entertain, that I envy her. She shields herself from Aristotle.When I saw ICB again, something like ten years ago, I was more knowledgeable about movie-making, more aware of the psychological screwiness of Dick and Perry, but I felt that same nausea I felt when I first saw the film.It still didn't make sense. Maybe it never will.
jmillerdp
Whenever this comes on, I find myself watching it. A fascinating, riveting account of the grisly murders of a farm family for money that never existed.The book was by Truman Capote. The writer/director here is Richard Brooks. He is masterful in his crafting of this story.The highlight is Conrad Hall's superlative cinematography! This is the all-time greatest widescreen black and white work ever.Robert Blake's performance has always been considered masterful. It's so tragic how he himself has fallen so hard.Recommended to anyone who loves true crime dramas, or classic cinema.********** (10 Out of 10 Stars)
dougdoepke
Few movies are more horrific or unsettling than this one. Writer-producer-director Richard Brooks may have set out to denounce the death penalty, but what he got instead was a penetrating trip into the proverbial heart of darkness, made all the more affecting because based on fact. Watch those cold barren landscapes pass by as the death car approaches its destination: the lonely burger stand, the austere hardware store, the empty sidewalks and featureless sky, a gray horizon ebbing out to nowhere. It's early winter on the high prairie. These are the contours of alienation, Midwestern style, the kind of inner and outer terrain that periodically produces a Charlie Starkweather, a John Dillinger, or a Perry Smith. This revealing early part is too often overlooked for the facile Freudianizing that comes later on.Then too, it's Ozzie and Harriet, David and Ricky, who are slaughtered. By all accounts, the Klutters were a prototypical 50's family -- well-adjusted, friendly folks, so confident of the outside world as to not even lock the front door. One can only imagine the actual horror of that routine Saturday night in a remote Kansas town, or of Nancy Klutter alone in bed, awaiting the final footsteps of the shotgun blast. There was another kind of America out there, one they could hardly imagine, but one just as real as their own well-ordered lives. And it blew in off the frozen prairie, psychopathic drifters on that endless road to nowhere. Despite the differences in style, there are passages in this film every bit as scary as Hitchcock's celebrated Psycho.Fortunately, producer Books wins out over writer Brooks. Writer Brooks is too eager to subvert the expressionist horror with political preachments, but producer Brooks had the good sense to go on location and hire non-movie stars Blake and Wilson. As visual doubles of killers Smith and Hickock, they project the so-called banality of evil, in spades. But they also bring an unexpected pathos-- subtle enough argument against the death penalty. Brooks' real triumph, however, was to bring on board Conrad Hall as cameraman. It's Hall's superbly gripping style -- as another reviewer ably illustrates-- that glues the elements into a single atmospheric whole. Without that sustaining mood the film would collapse into disparate, opposing halves, allowing writer Brooks' flawed script to dominate. Anyone thinking that black and white photography is artistically passé should view this film, an enduring masterpiece of the genre.The actual events of November,1959, reached across the Midwest to New York City where they caught the eye of littérateur Truman Capote, who used them to change the face of crime writing in America. That same cold wind blew westward too, across those of us in southeastern Colorado. Suddenly, deer rifles came off racks, doors got locked, and strangers best kept moving. A bleak early winter quickly got bleaker. I'm a long way from that time now, but maybe not so far, after all. Echoes from that nightmare weekend still sound somewhere deep inside. Maybe it's the echo that still keeps my gun close to the bed and my doors securely locked. And, for sure, a light on somewhere in the house, anywhere.In retrospect, the killings, coming at the very end of that mythic decade, amount to a symbolic shattering of a more tranquil time, of a complaisant middle-class, and to a telling portent of the turbulent decade to come. Fifty-five years later, I only hope that somewhere, somehow, the book and the movie have done some good. Something to help compensate for the brief, promising life of Nancy Klutter. For it's through her last agonizing moments-- alone and facing into the night --that we all experience those final echoing footsteps that is the true heart of darkness.
