She Treads Softly: In Cold Blood, movie

Thursday, June 17, 2010

In Cold Blood, movie

In Cold Blood (1967)

Director: Richard Brooks

Actors: Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe, Paul Stewart, Gerald S. O'Loughlin

TCM was showing the movie In Cold Blood yesterday and I decided to watch it because: 1. I had never watched it before and 2. I recently reread the book.

On TCM Robert Osborne commented that Brooks purposefully chose to not cast big stars in the roles of Perry and Dick. Filmed in black and white, Brooks took an approach that was almost like a documentary. He did almost all of the filming on location in the places where the events depicted occurred, including the same Kansas house in which the Cutter family was murdered. I think this gave the movie authenticity and a real sense of place. Naturally, Truman Capote's brilliant book is the better of the two, but the movie certainly did a fine job covering this horrific true crime.

2 comments:

raidergirl3 said...: Now, you need to watch the movie Capote, based on Harper Lee and Truman Capote's trip to Kansas to research the book. Also tells the story of the killers. Excellent.; June 17, 2010 at 8:02 PM
Lori L said...: You're right - I was thinking that earlier after I read Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. I should have just made a whole Capote/Lee/In Cold Blood mini-challenge, LOL!; June 17, 2010 at 8:16 PM

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.