Courtroom Drama #8 - In Cold Blood (1967)

I was actually really excited when I saw that In Cold Blood was on this list. I read the book last summer and really liked it, and I don't think I even knew there was a movie. In Cold Blood is a Truman Capote book, and I really like him - I enjoy his writing style and inexplicable film appearances - so the book was a big hit with me. It's nonfiction and about this random murder of a family in Kansas. It's really a character study of the guys who committed the crime, and the story, especially in the movie, follows them more than any other side of the murder. It's very interesting - the story makes a point of making them real people, and even though they aren't portrayed at all sympathetically, there still not just flat-out evil. It also comes right at the beginning of the time when they were starting to get some information on the phenomenon of serial killers - the idea of people killing just for the sake of it was just becoming a real theory at the time - So it was interesting to see them discuss that in the movie.

 The whole thing is a lot like Rope to me, which is an Alfred Hitchcock movie about Leopold and Loeb (They murdered a man as an intellectual exercise) from way back in 1940. The two men in that movie have a very similar relationship to the men in In Cold Blood, at least as far as their murdering dynamic goes. It should be noted that I don't actually think their relationships are similar in any other way. The dynamic they have is interesting to me though, because even with only the two instances of it, it gives the impression that that sort of dynamic is common in murder, that you get two people pushing each other toward that to...impress each other, basically, often. It's interesting to me that you can see the same relationship between two unrelated sets of murders. It's very strange.

But the movie - It is wonderfully Sixties. I really liked the way it was filmed. The music was very guitar-y and plucky and it was filmed in that 60's way with all the weird angles and like filming from above and musical montages and things - Think a darker West Side Story. It was in black and white but the picture was real sharp, so I liked the contrast. The whole thing was very enjoyable to watch. It does drag a little at the end and in the middle, when they're in Mexico, but it picks up, so that's okay. The only thing I really didn't like was that they filmed the movie in the house where the actual murders occurred. That just seems...icky to me. I'm not a fan of that.

I really liked In Cold Blood - It was interesting and it was well filmed and it had good music. I thought about it way more than I thought about A Cry in the Dark. Also, Paul Frees just randomly showed up in the middle, which was a fun surprise.