Richard Brooks (1967)

In Cold Blood is back at the BFI and in selected cinemas and the original trailer is being used to herald the film’s return.  The trailer is fascinating both as an example of contemporary film promotion and in its strong emphasis on Richard Brooks’s use of locations, in and around Holcomb, Kansas, where the murders committed by Perry Smith and Dick Hickock took place in November 1959.  The killings are filmed in the very house where the victims, the Clutter family, lived and were shot dead.   The trial scene takes place in the courthouse where Smith and Hickock were tried and features several members of the real-life jury.  The eventual executions are carried out, as they were in reality, in the Kansas State Penitentiary.  This ‘authenticity’ is a significant part of the experience of watching In Cold Blood, at least at this distance in time.  I distinctly remember when I read the Truman Capote book (early 1981).  I don’t remember when I first saw Brooks’s screen adaptation but feel it was around the same time that Bennett Miller’s Capote appeared in British cinemas, in the early weeks of 2006.  It was certainly long before I saw Douglas McGrath’s Infamous, released later in the same year but which I didn’t catch up with until 2013.  I wanted to see In Cold Blood again – and to try and see it afresh, even though I knew it would be difficult to clear my mind of the Miller and McGrath films of nearly four decades later.  When I say that I now find Brooks’s In Cold Blood disappointing, perhaps the assessment is coloured by other, Capote-centric incarnations of the material – perhaps I’m just admitting that I failed to do what I hoped to do.  But I don’t think it’s as simple as that.  Even if those recent pictures hadn’t been made, there would be a case for judging Brooks’s film to be seriously incomplete because it doesn’t reflect what’s explicit in – indeed, the essential theme of – Capote and Infamous:  that In Cold Blood is as much about Truman Capote as it is about the Clutter murders and the two young men responsible for the killings.

While it may be technically debatable as to whether In Cold Blood is the first ‘non-fiction novel’, there’s little disagreement about the book’s formal originality.  In contrast, when Richard Brooks wrote his screenplay, the dramatisation of true crime was a well-established screen genre.  Brooks invents a character, a reporter, named Jensen.  He’s a kind of counterpart to Truman Capote, but doesn’t remotely evoke him and isn’t meant to:  Jensen (Paul Stewart) is an intentionally neutral figure, designed not to intrude on the main action of the film.  (It’s particularly clumsy, therefore, when, in the closing stages, Brooks starts using Jensen as voiceover narrator.)  The opening titles nevertheless announce the film as ‘Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood‘ and Richard Brooks, having virtually jettisoned Capote, still seems anxious to find ways to reflect the innovative nature of the source material – the application of a fiction-writer’s talents to an account of actual events and the people involved in those events.  A quasi-documentary style of filming and performance is an obvious option and one that Brooks to some extent follows.  In a few cases, citizens of Holcomb play themselves; more often, the reality of the people on screen depends on either the actors concerned being unfamiliar faces or on very naturalistic playing or a combination of the two.  A couple of better-known actors who, in the years ahead, became bigger names through roles in long-running television series do well:  Will Geer (Grandpa in The Waltons in the 1970s) is impressive in a cameo as the prosecutor at the murder trial; John Forsythe (Blake Carrington in Dynasty in the 1980s) gives a skilfully-judged performance in the larger role of the investigating sheriff, Alvin Dewey.  Compared with the realism of the acting, the cinematography, editing and music have a more flamboyant, dramatising quality.   This juxtaposition of ‘lifelike’ and ‘theatrical’ elements might seem to correspond well to the ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ aspects of the book of In Cold Blood but Brooks hasn’t found a way to replicate Truman Capote’s integrating voice.  As a result, the effect of these various elements is fragmentary.  In the event,  Brooks’s use of actual locations – provided, of course, that the viewer is aware that they are the real thing – is almost the best the director can do to emulate what’s distinctive about Capote’s original.

Truman Capote is highly conspicuous by his absence from this film.  In Cold Blood was a notorious book largely because many readers felt Capote, in gaining access to Dick Hickock and Perry Smith and finding out about their wretched lives, had become intrigued by or even attracted to the killers, to the extent of understating the appalling nature of their crimes and showing insufficient sympathy for their four victims – the well-off, God-fearing farmer, Herbert Clutter, his wife Bonnie, and their teenage children, Kenyon and Nancy.  (Capote’s obsession with Perry Smith in particular is, of course, a major theme of the films made by Bennett Miller and Douglas McGrath.)  One of the more troubling aspects of Brooks’s treatment is that, while he retains elements of Capote’s luridly sympathetic biography of Perry Smith, there is – since Capote has been excised from the narrative – no sense that this is a personal, emotionally partial perspective.  Brooks’s reconstruction of the murders is gruellingly extended.  It’s powerful enough to convey the Clutters’ terrifying ordeal but the traumatic flashbacks that Smith experiences as he carries out the crimes both slow things down and upstage the victims in a way that’s offensive:  it isn’t the time or place for splashy psychologising.  You don’t get, in the film’s account of the murders, a strong sense of the crazy confusion that likely reigned once Hickock and Smith, who claimed to have intended armed robbery rather than homicide, discovered there was hardly any cash on the premises.

In Brooks’s elaborate but confused stylistic scheme, the two killers stand out in the wrong way.  They’re the main parts, of course, but, without Truman Capote’s ‘presence’ in the film’s portraits of Smith and Hickock, the actors playing them seem artificial.  Robert Blake’s physique and face are so extraordinary that, as Perry Smith, he overcomes this problem to an extent – but only to an extent.  Scott Wilson subsequently proved himself a fine actor (in, for example, Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby (1974) and Phil Morrison’s Junebug (2005)) and there are some effective details in his playing of Dick Hickock but they’re external details:  Wilson doesn’t get inside Hickock’s head.  Quincy Jones’s score points up rather too obviously from the start the difference between the lives of Smith and Hickock and of their victims-to-be but the visual aspects of In Cold Blood are more remarkable.   Peter Zinner executes some startling, swift cuts that jolt the action forward – from the night of the killings to the morning after, from the moment of the killers’ arrest to its aftermath.  Conrad Hall’s black-and-white cinematography creates different, disturbing textures of darkness.  A famous image near the end of the film is more problematic.  Shortly before his execution, Perry Smith sits beside the window of his cell.  It’s raining outside and Robert Blake’s face is lit so that its left-hand side is illuminated by the raindrops.  These suggest more than tears; it’s as if Smith’s face is on the point of disintegration.  The composition is extraordinary yet it’s compelling only because it’s ingenious – and Smith’s final monologue accompanying the image is too deliberate.  As with the memories invading his head as he kills the Clutter family, the aesthetic qualities of Richard Brooks’s effects draw attention to themselves and away from the substance of In Cold Blood. 

16 September 2015