Anatomy of a Murder

Truman Capote called it a "nonfiction novel," a dubious tag designed to draw attention to the undeniable fact that he had used the novelist's craft to render reality. Through painstaking accretion of minutiae, In Cold Blood harrowingly anatomized a multiple murder and in the process brought literary life to six dead people. They were the four members of the prosperous Clutter family of Holcomb, Kans., and their killers. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, who were executed in 1965. Although the book was flawed by a seeming excess of sympathy for the criminals, it had the sweeping force and glare of high-beam headlights zooming down a forgotten country road. In Richard Brooks's film version, the candlepower is weakened, but the power and fascination of the story are undiminished. The nonfiction novel has become anything but a noncinematic movie.

Writer-Director Brooks has followed Capote's story with remarkable fidelity. Hickock (Scott Wilson), an ex-con, allows his narrow, twisted mind to feed on rumors of a safe with $10,000 in the Clutter farmhouse. He persuades his parolee friend Smith to come along for the ride. But this is no ordinary caper, since both men teeter on the edge of madness. Hickock has strong but subliminal homosexual feelings, and likes to call his colleague "Honey." Perry, brutalized since childhood by his rodeo-riding father, is the victim of a motorcycle accident that left his dwarfed legs in perpetual agony. To alleviate the pain, he has become an aspirin addict, chewing tablets in twos and threes. At the farmhouse, the pair's dream of riches turns into a nightmare of disappointment: there is no safe, no money. In an orgy of rage, they kill the four Clutters, an unremarkable family of 4-H prosperity and rectitude.

Evil's Banality. The clues they leave behind are minimal: a few footprints and some rope with which they tied their victims. But Hickock and Smith are pathetic examples of the banality of evil. With innumerable chances to es cape capture, they start a spree of flamboyant check bouncing and petty thievery that keep them constantly on the road, from Mexico to Las Vegas to Kansas City, where the police dragnet pulls them in. In their luggage are the two pairs of boots that wallowed through the Clutters' blood.

Capote's book was constructed cinematically, with swift cuts from the killers to the family to the police, flashbacks from the trial to the crime itself.

The movie's weakest point, ironically, is its self-conscious filmishness. The black-and-white photography by Conrad Hall may be the best of the year, but Brooks tricks it up with flashy dissolves--a bus becomes a moving train, a prostitute metamorphizes into Perry's mother--that give the film a slick and slippery surface. In Cold Blood, moreover, unnecessarily belabors the arguments against capital punishment by introducing a sob-brother journalist who wearyingly articulates the message.

Players v. People. But these are peripheral faults. Of greater importance are the picture's virtues, including Brooks's grimly detailed study of the wintry Kansas plains and his scrupulous attention to authenticity--the Clutter home itself was used, the murders filmed in the room where they occurred. The director's greatest triumph, however, is his use of unknowns. With the exception of a handful of character actors in minor parts, and John Forsythe as a detective, no face in the film is fa miliar--least of all Dick's and Perry's. Thus, like obscure performers in a foreign film, they have no prior images to disturb the fragile illusion that they are not players but people.

As Perry, Robert Blake has the narcissistic good looks Capote described, with "the dark moist eyes" and bril-liantined black hair; he even appears to have "the stunted legs that seemed grotesquely inadequate to the grownup bulk they supported." Scott Wilson, as Dick, has the "long-jawed and narrow face tilted, the left side rather lower than the right," and the "American-style, good-kid" manner that can bounce a check or a baseball with equal ease. It is their performances that lift the film from documentary competence to near brilliance. In the end, the actors have become the criminals, understandable if not forgivable, and Perry's last words, "I'd like to apologize, but to who?", have the persistent ring of a child's unanswerable question that remains in the air after he has gone.

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