In Cold Blood (1967) Review
9/10
Two men on parole drive to a farmhouse outside Holcomb, Kansas in November 1959, looking for a safe that doesn’t exist. They bind and kill four members of the Clutter family and leave with a few dollars, a radio and a pair of binoculars. Every true-crime film made since looks a little cheap to me next to this one. It refuses to thrill you, and it’s harder to sit through than half the horror films of the last fifty years. The 9 is for total refusal of Hollywood comfort. Black and white in a year of color, unknowns in the lead roles, real locations, no score in the sequences that matter, and a structure that gives you the crime, the pursuit, the trial and the executions without ever asking you to enjoy any of it.
The point I withhold is for the psychology in the last third. That reaches occasionally for explanation the material doesn’t support. Brooks was making an argument about capital punishment and the argument is sometimes louder than the film.
He Shot It Where It Happened
Brooks was a former journalist and he did his own research. Shooting took place in the Clutter house itself, in the courtroom where the trial was held, and at the Kansas State Penitentiary, on the actual gallows.
He went further than that. Seven of the original jurors appear in the film. So does the real hangman. So does Nancy Clutter’s horse, Babe. Less than a decade had passed since the murders and the community was still there.
That decision is either the film’s greatest strength or an unforgivable intrusion, and it’s both. None of that authenticity is decorative. When the killers walk through that kitchen, it’s the kitchen, and the film’s refusal to build a set is the same refusal that makes it hard to watch. Brooks also removed the distraction when it appeared. Capote arrived during the shoot and drew enormous press attention, and Brooks asked him to leave. He went, after posing with Blake and Wilson for the cover of Life.
There’s a symmetry in that worth thinking about. Capote had spent six years with these two men, had come to know Smith well, and had wanted the executions to happen so the book could end. Brooks removing him from the set is a director declining to let the author’s presence become part of the story a second time.
Shooting where it happened is a tool with a cost, and the cost is borne by real people. Using the actual house sharpens every frame and it also puts a camera crew inside somebody’s grief.
The question to ask is whether the specificity serves the subject or only the effect. Brooks was making a film that argues against executions, and shooting on the real gallows is essential to that argument. For a writer working from real events, the equivalent is deciding how close to the actual names and places to go. Closer is more powerful and more intrusive, and there’s no formula. There’s only the question of what the closeness is for.
Cast for Resemblance and It Worked
Robert Blake and Scott Wilson were both unknown and both cast for their physical likeness to Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Blake’s resemblance to Smith is close enough to be disquieting.
Neither performance reaches for sympathy and neither reaches for menace. They play two men of limited intelligence and enormous grievance who talk constantly about a future they’re not going to have. Hickock is a boaster, Smith is a wounded romantic, and the film lets both be tedious, because they were.
Blake’s monologue about his childhood is the most discussed scene in the film, delivered with rain running down a window and lighting the tears on his face. It’s the moment where the film’s argument becomes explicit and it’s also the moment Blake makes Smith a person. That monologue is the scene I’d rate the film on if I had to pick one. Blake doesn’t beg for pity, and I end up feeling something for Smith anyway. I resent it a little, and I think Brooks wanted me to.
John Forsythe as the investigating agent is the film’s only recognizable face. That’s a deliberate imbalance. The audience has an anchor on the side of the law and no comforting familiarity anywhere near the killers.
The casting also does something no set of stars could. Because nobody knows these two faces, the audience has no accumulated goodwill to spend and no expectation about who survives. They’re simply two men in a car. That’s what the people in Holcomb saw.
Conrad Hall Photographed It Like a Crime Scene
Hall shot in black and white, in a year when that was already a statement, and the images are among the best in American cinema. The technique is chiaroscuro applied to flat farmland. Headlights arriving up a driveway, a lit window in miles of dark, faces half in shadow across a car seat, rain on glass. The Kansas exteriors look like photographs from the era instead of photography about it.
The most famous shot is the rain on the window during Smith’s monologue. That was reportedly achieved by placing the light so the shadows of the water ran down his face like tears. It’s a trick and it’s also exactly right, because Smith is a man performing his own tragedy.
Hall was nominated and lost. He’d win eventually, twice, decades later, and the second of those came posthumously for Road to Perdition. This is the film where the eye was already fully formed.
Conrad Hall’s black-and-white photography is some of the finest I know. The headlights coming up the driveway and that lit window in the dark are images I can’t shake, and they frighten me because they’re so beautiful.
Restraint in a violent story is a technical decision with moral consequences. The murders here are largely withheld, delivered in fragments and out of order, and the withholding is what prevents the film from becoming entertainment. When you do show it, show it late and briefly. Brooks holds the full account of the killings until the last act, by which point the audience knows both men well enough for it to be unbearable instead of exciting.
The general rule: sequence controls meaning. The same events told in a different order are a thriller or an elegy, and nothing about the content has to change.
The Argument About the Rope
The final section is about the executions, and Brooks isn’t neutral. Smith and Hickock spent five years on death row and the film follows them to the gallows and stays with the mechanics. The staging is deliberately procedural. A trap door, a rope, a man checking his watch, witnesses standing in a warehouse. There’s no drama in it because there’s no drama in it. That’s the point being made. Where the film overreaches is in the reaching for cause. There are lines about broken fathers, poverty and the state producing the men it then kills, and they’re the weakest writing in the picture, because the film has already shown all of it far more effectively.
I don’t object to the position. I object to it being spoken. The gallows sequence makes the case completely, and the film puts a paragraph of argument on top of an image that needed nothing.
The detail that hits hardest is the wait. Five years between sentence and rope, appeals filed and denied, two men aging in a cell block while the state works through its paperwork. Brooks lets that duration sit in the film, and duration is the part of an execution nobody dramatizes because it’s not dramatic.
What It Set the Standard For
The film cost about three and a half million dollars and took around thirteen million. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, for Brooks twice as director and screenwriter, for Hall’s cinematography and for Quincy Jones’s score, and won none of them.
It arrived in the same year as Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, and it deals with the same rootlessness those films made fashionable in a far more extreme form. It was the least comfortable of the three and the least rewarded.
What it established is the docudrama as a serious form. Every later film built from a real crime is working with the vocabulary Brooks assembled here: real locations, unknown actors, procedural detail, withheld violence, no score where the silence does more.
Quincy Jones’s contribution should be named. The score is jazz, sparse, used rarely, and it stops entirely in the sequences where the wind around the farmhouse is the only sound. Knowing when not to play is the whole skill.
Whoever solves a form’s problems first defines it, and the solutions become conventions. Everything that reads as standard true-crime grammar today was a decision somebody made once. Study the first version of a form instead of the current one. The original has the reasoning still visible, because the filmmaker was choosing and not inheriting.
The most transferable lesson here’s about silence. Brooks and Jones remove the music at the moments of highest tension. That’s the opposite of instinct and correct every time they do it.
Should you watch In Cold Blood?
Yes, and be ready for it. This is a film about four murders that refuses to make them exciting, shot in the house where they happened, and it plays closer to a document than a drama. I’d give it the full 10 if Brooks had trusted his gallows scene to speak for itself and cut some of the explaining around it. As it stands, Hall’s photography and two performances that never once ask for your affection make it a 9 I’d hand to anybody who thinks they’ve seen a true-crime film.
