Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences was born to be a movie. The book was an immediate best-seller on its release in 1966, and plans were afoot to film it almost before it rolled off the presses. Capote's improbable inspiration was a 300-word piece in the New York Times — then, as now, little more than a blurb — about a murder in a remote corner of Kansas; something about it captivated his imagination, and he spent the next seven years crafting, along with his friend and fellow novelist Harper Lee, a masterful true-crime story about the pointless killing of the Clutter family. Just as Capote had no idea at the time how obsessed he would become with the story of the Clutters and the murderous drifters, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who took their lives, the public had no idea that the book he wrote about them would launch a new genre of fiction — the 'non-fiction novel' — and stand out as an early example of what would become known as 'the New Journalism'. It would also cast a huge shadow over Capote's life and career; of all his works, none save Breakfast at Tiffany's would so resonate with the public. The public was fascinated with the story, with the novel that Capote wrote about it, with the way Capote wrote the books, and with the movie made from the book — in fact, so fascinated that as recently as a few years ago, not one but two movies were made about his research into the Clutter murders: 2005's Capote and Infamous the following year. The 1967 film was as celebrated as the book was influential; the year of its release, it was nominated for four Academy Awards (score, screenplay adaptation, Richard Brooks' direction, and Connie Hall's striking black & white cinematography) and has remained a widely respected film, if not entirely the classic that it seemed to be when it first hit screens. But how do book and movie compare?
WHAT IT HAD: Huge amounts of verisimilitude. Brooks believed that if his film adapatation was going to succeed, he needed to immerse it in as much detailed authenticity as he possibly could in order to emulate Capote's own research into the Clutter killings, and he accomplished this to a remarkable degree: the film features actual photos of the Clutters, filming was done in the home where the murders took place, and other locations and details were as accurate as possible. Hall's cinematography is still remarkable, and the cool, evenly paced direction balances out the increasing madness of the narrative. The lead performances by Robert Blake as Smith and, especially, Scott Wilson as Hickock, hold up remarkably well.
WHAT IT LACKED: Due to legal clearance issues, Capote could not be portrayed in the film, leading to the awkward insertion of a narrator and the reporter "Jensen". As a device, it doesn't quite work. Some of the supporting performances — played by theater students from the University of Kansas — are much weaker than the leads. Brooks was an accomplished director, but not an especially stylish one, and his shot composition and sense of cinema are sometimes unworthy of Hall's cinematography; he's also not as good a screenwriter as Capote is a writer. But, by the same token, Capote, even in true-crime mode, could be awfully purple, and some of the dialogue he attributes to the townsfolk is undoubtedly his own; Brooks is faithful to the book when he should be original, and the reverse is also true.
DID IT SUCCEED?: The book has held up much better than the movie, but the film shouldn't be written off as a failure. Age has not been kind to it, it's true, and its final scenes — of Smith's bathetic confessional, aided and abetted by accidental 'tears' of rainfall — seem less moving and more hokey every year, even with the creepy verisimilitude of Blake's own troubles with the law. But it's still a beautiful-looking film, gorgeously filmed and exquisitely paced, matching the book's slow but deliberate teasing out of the sordid, squalid details of the crime. Wilson's lead performance is still a winner, and it remains a more compelling document than the two recent making-of movies, although one wishes that Phillip Seymour Hoffman's astounding job as Capote in the film of the same name could be retroactively ported in to replace Paul Stewart's bland gig as the Capote stand-in Jensen. An inessential, but interesting, contemporary companion piece to the timeless 'non-fiction novel'.