Quincy Jones wrote the music for the In Cold Blood, the 1967 film of Truman Capote’s classic book and jazz plays a key role in the atmosphere of the film, says Selwyn Harris, ‘In Cold Blood' is more ambiguous, thought provoking and less comfortingly optimistic than the majority of mainstream Hollywood films’,

It could be the contemporary appetite for so-called docu-dramas in the cinema that has recently rekindled interest in Truman Capote’s fact-based crime novel In Cold Blood. So much so that there’s been not one, but two Hollywood films made in the space of just two years based on the author’s life at the time he was writing the book. With its high profile release, Capote (2005), for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for his portrayal of the author, completely overshadowed this year’s new release Infamous. They both however explore an identical theme: Capote’s fascination with the horrendous slaying of an upright Kansas City farmer and his family in 1959, and his intimate liaison with one of the killers, Perry Smith. Unfortunately Infamous had its thunder stolen by the earlier Capote, since it is actually the far superior of the two.

Mixing journalistic reportage with a fictional writing style, Capote’s book invented a “vivid” journalistic school of writing in the US that was carried forward by authors such as Tom Wolfe. Capote’s novelistic reconstruction of the case is most controversial for painting a sympathetic picture of the murderers in spite of them having killed their victims just for the hell of it. Only a year after it was published, In Cold Blood (1967) was adapted for film by the writer/director Richard Brooks and generally sticks to a similarly provocative approach, at least for the times it was made.

Filmed in black and white, largely on Capote’s insistence, the film’s seedy, film noir cinematography brings a hauntingly realistic edge to the melodrama. Brooks also went all the way in his authentic reconstruction of events to the extent that he used all the original locations, including the actual house in which the tragedy took place, the court and seven of the original jurors, and the actual gallows in the Kansas state penitentiary in which the pair eventually hung. In the morbid attention to detail, he went so far as to use real photos of the family in the house, and the horse that belonged to one of the victims.

The film begins with a rendezvous between a pair of ex-cell mates Perry Smith and Dick Hickock who’ve just been released on parole. Dick has been tipped off by another prisoner about a perfect “score”, a safe containing $10, 000 belonging to a wealthy farming family from Kansas called the Clutters. Like a road movie, the first half of the film follows the trail of the pair as they drive 800-miles to the Clutter’s Kansas home. Along the way, we see them in the light of their backgrounds and broken dreams. This is a point at which the film has real impact: the audience has to reconcile the fact that the killers are capable of both amorality and humanity.

The controversial 1994 film Natural Born Killers actually took its title from a piece of dialogue used in Capote’s book, and from a phrase that Dick uses to describe Perry in the film. Like many effective partnerships, the killers are opposites: Dick is pragmatic, outgoing and cynical while Perry is a hypersensitive time bomb, an introspective daydreamer, on a mission to find Captain Cortez’ sunken treasure in Mexico by following his father’s maps. Although there is no safe in the house, the two men set about slaying all five members of the family. Detectives are flummoxed as to the killers’ identity until a reward is offered and Dick’s ex-prison buddy comes forward with information.

This feature is taken from Jazzwise Issue 107 - to read the rest of this article subscribe here