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• Chilling!

  • RedRain
  • 2/25/13

  Exceptional true-life film that should scare you to the bone! The fact that this film is shot more like a documentary only enhances its value. The cinematography is phenomenal, using shadow and light so effectively to add to the drama of the filming in black and white. This is one film that definitely should never have been made in color, as it would have lost its impact Excellent performances by the actors but the star of the film is the story. I remember this case very well, as it was quite the sensation in its day and the papers were filled with the description of the crime. One thing is certain. Nothing changes, as this same type of crime was committed in 2007 on a family in Connecticut, where a home invasion spurred by greed ended up with the mother and two daughters being savagely murdered. "In Cold Blood" chilled Truman Capote when he interviewed the killers and it chills the rest of us to this day. All murders should!

• Hated this film

  • Blake
  • 6/9/12

  It was very boring, and to be honest the supporting cast did a better job than the lead! How bad is that?! Dick and Perry looked too... dirty. I understand they were supposed to be vagrant criminals, but come one comb the hair at least. I did not like this movie enough to even finish it (1 hour in I stopped)

• In Cold Blood

  • Jeff
  • 1/3/12

  I remember this movie from when I was a child. To have it be made from true life happenings says a whole lot about the ugly side of the human mind. Truman was a great author and he is at his best in this book and movie. Too bad that a author like him only comes around maybe once in a generation. The deep darkness of the movie the back ground music and all the actors are brilliant the director is impeccable in his direction and his ability to bring out the raw nature of the subject manner without the gore of today's films. He leaves the viewer with a sense of what is happening to the victims with out actually showing the deed.

• Still powerful after all these years

  • douglassk
  • 2/21/11

  A high achievement in documentary-style filmmaking and a step forward for the mature, modern American film. As noted in the book “Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks,” the writer-director set out to match in film what author Truman Capote achieved in print in telling the story of a family’s murder and the two killers who were executed for the crime. Capote’s “nonfiction novel” sought to use the techniques of fiction to tell a true story. As a filmmaker, Brooks sought to make a movie version of “In Cold Blood” as realistic as he could. First, he conducted his own investigation into the killings and the killers. Then he shot the film in almost all the actual locations where the events took place. (For example, he rented the Clutter farmhouse for $15,000 to recreate that awful night in 1959 when Perry Smith and Dick Hickock killed a couple and two of their children during a fruitless burglary.) Brooks also resisted studio demands that he cast stars in the roles of the killers (Paul Newman and Steve McQueen were suggested) and that he shoot in color (Brooks believed that b&w was inherently frightening). The movie itself is notable for depicting the killers to be the pitiable losers they were yet not excusing them for their deeds. It also made the anti-death penalty statement Brooks sought – and Capote himself supported in his dual-meaning title. Brilliant photography by Conrad Hall and powerful acting by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson give this classic film energy and punch.

• In Cold blood

  • macdaddy
  • 6/17/10

  When I first saw this movie back in the 1960's I was very impressed with the performance of Robert Blake (not so much now after watching him do the same character in several movies). Scott Wilson is terrific. It is morbid, but watching the murders being re-enacted in the original Clutter family house, in the original rooms still sends chills up my spine.

• Killers, Not Victims

  • Bruce Reber
  • 5/18/09

  "In Cold Blood" is a stark and shocking story of the real-life murders of a Kansas farm family by 2 ex-con drifters, but it fails in its attempt to portray Smith and Hickok as victims driven to commit a heinous crime by their personal attitudes and situations rather than the sociopathic killers they were. If they hadn't made one fatal mistake (leaving their shoe prints in one of their victim's blood), they might have literally gotten away with murder. Also, someone comments that neither Smith or Hickok could have done the murders by themselves, and when they teamed up a third violent and psychotic personality was formed. I don't agree; I think either one could have done it. In the end they both pay the ultimate price-their own lives. Smith and Hickok were cold-blooded killers, not victims. Murder is murder, no matter who commits it.

• Crime does not pay

  • MinkyPhillippe
  • 5/6/07

  What was left out of this film was as important as the murders themselves. If crime does not pay is the theme, then the death of these murders should have been magnified but it was not. Perry Smith, the shooter was at the end, dragged kicking and screaming up those final set of steps--- this shold have been the message of the film but instead it was left out. Why?

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