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The actual crime story at the core of In Cold Blood might seem a little 'tame' for those who are weened on the classic serial killer stories (Gein, Bundy, Dahmer), or just the more notorious cases out in Hollywood (OJ, Manson). The essential facts in the case don't amount to anything terribly convoluted: Perry Smith and Dick Hickock (here played by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson respectively) met by some luck, conspired to rob a man's farmhouse safe out in Kansas, and after killing a family of four with a shotgun and dagger came away with 43 dollars. Aside from their returning to the US after fleeing briefly to Mexico, there isn't a whole lot of mystery to the resolution either. They were caught by some stroke of ironic chance (a cop followed them and stopped them for having a stolen car after Smith and Hickcock helped out a boy and his old man collecting bottles for change), and sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. The story ended in 1965.
But it's the handling of the story, moments of moot, the performances, a pure cinematic touch that Brooks and his absolutely marvelous (the late/great) DP Conrad Hall provides in crisp widescreen black and white, and a storytelling style that feels realistic without going into too much naturalism or too much melodrama (save perhaps for near the end, which is pitch perfect). The air of tragedy hangs over the story, and not so much because of the killings themselves, no matter how brutal they are as the "third" man that is conjured up, as the narrator observes, by Smith and Hickcock teaming up, but because of the inevitability of the story. You feel somehow for these criminals, who in any other hands would be just be conventional figures or something out of a B-movie. These aren't good people, but they aren't necessarily monsters either, at least all the way through.
It's also an excellent 'road-movie' as we see Smith and Hickcock on the road down to the Clutter residence (the actual night-time scene of the crime taking place late in the film), then on to Mexico, then back to America towards Las Vegas. We get to soak in the personalities of these two, probably even more than that of the police detectives who at first have no leads and then finally get a break with an inmate. It's actually kind of disturbing to get this close to these two (sort of akin to the aimless quality of Malick's Badlands characters), and it's also a sign of daring for the period. There's no sermonizing, like "he did this because of that and this or the other." We see how Smith had an abusive, psychotic father, but that Smith loved and hated him. The complexity there is too much for the movie, maybe even too much for Capote's book (which, I should confess, I've still yet to read, though I plan to). And we see Hickcock is this creature of slick confidence (i.e. getting the suit and other things with bad checks), but without any deep-rooted explanation to it all.
The streak of fatalism in In Cold Blood is some of the starkest of the 60s, and it's the luck of Brooks to have its stars as Blake in his top-of-the-pops performance (this and Lost Highway, oddly enough considering his real life saga in recent years, his quintessential pieces of work), and Wilson's breakthrough before becoming a character actor. While they're surrounded by fine supporting work, they themselves are eerily absorbing, driven more or less by greed and fantasies of escapism with treasure, and staying pretty much grounded in their situation through the death row and on through their ends. Is this a morale of the story, if there could be one, that it's more horrifying to confront the possibility that those who kill can't be classified, of good vs evil getting smudged? Smith apologized for his crime before being hung, and he points out, "but to who?" This is a story bound to give the most hardened fans of true-crime the bonafide chills, and it's quite possibly the best American film of 1967.


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