Some things can’t be improved upon, and IN COLD BLOOD is one of them. Modern movies about senseless killings don’t hold a candle to this stark, documentary-like film by Richard Brooks… as chilling and effective today as when it came out in 1967.”
– Jami Bernard, Daily News

“Robert Blake, as a murderer, will make you feel for him. Quincy Jones, who wrote the film’s score, will make you feel queasy. And Richard Brooks, who directed, will take you into his black-and-white world and leave you there with two psychos who kill for pennies. Don’t resist; just go.”
– Time Out New York

(1967) Almost 40 years before CAPOTE, the new indie film starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, director Brooks cast Robert Blake (former child star / TV’s “Baretta” / acquitted murder suspect) and Scott Wilson as Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, whose arrest and conviction for the brutal murder of a family in Kansas attracted the attention of the very urban Capote.

On November 15, 1959, a quiet night in western Kansas, ex-cons Smith and Hickock broke into the home of prosperous farmer Herbert Clutter, ostensibly to commit burglary – but then systematically slaughtered Clutter, his wife and their two teenage children – a shotgun held just inches from their faces.

“Based on a true story.” Now the tag line for every other “Movie of the Week”; but when Brooks adapted Capote’s best-seller about the case, his ruthlessly realistic treatment was not only a breakthrough in American filmmaking and the granddaddy of a genre, but has arguably never been topped for verisimilitude. Casting mostly little-known actors who bore uncanny resemblances to the actual participants, and authentic locals as bit players, Brooks shot the murders in the actual rooms in which they took place, with Conrad Hall’s widescreen black-and-white photography (cited in the documentary Visions of Light as a seminal work of ‘60s cinematography) giving a near-documentary feel – and with even the parallel editing of the multiple storylines reproducing the pacing of the book. Blake and Wilson give powerful – and oddly sympathetic – portrayals as the murderous Smith and Hickock, with John Forsythe as Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective Alvin Dewey.

A SONY PICTURES REPERTORY RELEASE.

WITH LOVE FROM TRUMAN (1965, Albert and David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin) Truman Capote, in the wake of his In Cold Blood triumph talks shop with a Newsweek interviewer at his place in the Hamptons, then takes the book’s real life hero, Kansas cop Alvin Dewey, and his wife for “breakfast” at Tiffany’s.