In Cold Blood

1996
6.2| 4h0m| en
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At the end of the 1950s, in a more innocent America, the brutal, meaningless slaying of a Midwestern family horrified the nation. This film is based on Truman Capote's hauntingly detailed, psychologically penetrating nonfiction novel. While in prison, Dick Hickock, 20, hears a cell-mate's story about $10,000 in cash kept in a home safe by a prosperous rancher. When he's paroled, Dick persuades ex-con Perry Smith, also 20, to join him in going after the stash. On a November night in 1959, Dick and Perry break into the Holcomb, Kansas, house of Herb Clutter. Enraged at finding no safe, they wake the sleeping family and brutally kill them all. The bodies are found by two friends who come by before Sunday church. The murders shock the small Great Plains town, where doors are routinely left unlocked. Detective Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation heads the case, but there are no clues, no apparent motive and no suspects...

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Alicia I love this movie so much
SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie
CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Arlis I watched this on T.V. when it first came out. I would've bet money that it was in the late 80's but it says here its 1996. I watched it with my sister and we only got to see the first part of the miniseries. I really was locked in by the whole attitude Anthony Edwards carried and the hate he showed.The rest of the cast did nothing for me. Sam Neil is about as dry as an actor can get and Eric Roberts is an ugly no talent nobody who has never made a movie that he didn't cry in. I guess he knows that his sister is a big millionaire and he's nothing - that must suck, and for the record I hate her with passion as well.The production of this movie was so plain and not even worthy of a lifetime movie of the week in my opinion. the direction has to be a character within its self and that was the most boring aspect of this movie for me.I found this DVD at wal-mart for $3 last month and just had to see the rest of it. I wish I had left it setting there and saved my $3. Anthony Edwards was mean and I liked him in it though and thats the reason to watch it. The fear he puts into that family. I just found out today that this is a remake of a 1967 Robert Blake movie of the same name. I'll try to get it and see if it's better.
Nick Houston After reading the book, I happened across this DVD at Wal-Mart for 3 bucks and thought, sure, what the hell... I got the DVD and watched it last night. When I started watching it, I checked the run time and it was about 90 minutes. I thought, OK cool... It seemed to run rather slowly, knowing the story and how much of it there was. By the time I got to the actual killings, I was like, "how much time does this have left?" Checked. "One minute?! What the hell?!" I felt incredibly cheated, thinking that the movie only progressed through a third of the overall story.But then, I happily noticed that the DVD's scene selection menu included a part 1 AND a part 2. I still had another hour and a half to go! I then sat very happily and enjoyed the second half of the movie, even more so than the first.I admit that I have not seen the 1967 original film (despite my sincerest desire to), I have however read the novel and felt that this was a fairly descent film, for a two-part TV miniseries, that is. I think the casting of the role of Perry was completely wrong and a few minor inconsistencies jumped out at me, but still very well done. The first half drags on a bit, while the second half is much more gripping. I think they should have proportioned the movie more like Capote did his book: 1/3 before the murders, 1/3 after, and 1/3 after the killers are arrested. Instead, the film makes it more 1/2 before the murders, 1/4 after, and 1/4 after the killers are arrested. Again, this makes the second half more exciting, but at the same time, less compelling while making the first half drag on and on...Now I look back and realize I have just made the same mistake about making things drag on and on, so I will shut the hell up. Go watch the movie and make up your own damn mind! Nick Houston
treasurebin2 In Cold Blood was one of several 60s films that created a new vision of violence in the Hollywood film industry. Capote coined the phrase "nonfiction novel" to describe the book on which this film is based, and the spirit of that form was carried over into the film script, which he co-wrote. Despite the fact that we were well into the era of color film, Richard Brooks elected to present this film in black and white to underscore both the starkness of the landscape and the bleakness of the story. This is the first problem with the TV remake --color changes the tone of the story. In addition, the confinement of shooting a film for TV makes reduces the options of how the shots are framed and focused. As a result, we lose the dramatic clash which makes the second part of the original film (police interviews, trial, imprisonment, and execution) so claustrophobic. On the small screen, it's just another version of Law and Order spin-offs. Hollywood's search for scripts continuously takes it back to movies that were successful in another age. Usually, that's a mistake, and this is no exception.All of the actors are competent. The script is OK. The directing doesn't get in the way. It's just that the movie doesn't work as well as the original precision instrument. It doesn't hook the viewer into the ambivalence toward Smith and Hickock that the original film provokes. At the end of the TV version, we are left with the feeling: "Ho hum, who cares?"See the original first, on as large a screen as you can, then watch the TV version simply to understand why the first one was such an important film in 1967.Wouldn't hurt to also go on line and read a bit about Capote and the original book. It will help you to understand the extraordinary effort he put into the material, and also some of the controversy surrounding both the book and the movie.I actually only gave this a 4 because I save the bottom 3 rankings for true bombs--the kind that enrage you about having been sucked into spending an
Robert J. Maxwell It boggles the mind. If they think another nickel can be squeezed out of a piece of material, they'll squeeze. The only reason I can think of that this story was retold was that the producers figured the audience was so stupid that they either never had seen the original or didn't know that there WAS an original. Well, maybe the assumption isn't that far off base. As a collective we seem to have dropped a good couple of IQ points somewhere along the way. Back in the 1960s Stanley Kaufman wrote an essay on "the film generation." In one of his classes he brought up Preminger's Joan of Arc, and his students did an impromptu comparison with Dreyer. His students don't do that anymore. They can't. They never heard of Dreyer. In the original "In Cold Blood," there is a lot of artsiness and pop psychology. It isn't a timeless classic, but it's a well-made movie. I don't know why anyone felt a remake was a good idea except, as I suggested, there might be another nickel left in it. The shot-by-shot remake of Psycho was a disgrace. It wasn't that long ago, by geological standards, that when a movie became a classic it was left alone. Can anyone imagine making "Gone With the Wind" now, without its being followed up by "Gone With the Wind, Part 2: Scarlett's Revenge"? What an insult this movie is. It's not badly done, but the motives behind its creation are scurrilous.

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