5/5 Classic
  by William R. Nicholas (Mahwah, NJ USA)
The hardest thing about watching In Cold Blood is not the voilence of the crime or even the crime itself; although the 1959 murder of the Cutters of Kanssess was particually callous.

The hardest thing is the detachment of the killers both before and after the crime. The murder was quickly planned on a jailbird tip, saying Cutter had 10,000 dollars --1959 money--in his safe. Smith and Hickcock planned to take the money and kill the family, cooling driving into Kanssas to do this.

Both before and after the slaughter, the two seem uneffected, and at first have a grand old time on a shopping spree with stolen checks. These guys are textbook sociopaths, and watching their emotional immunity to their own brutallity is vicerally disquieting.

Seeing this, you could briefly think that Smith was slightly more sympathetic, but I am not buying. According to him, he did not let Hickcock assult the Cutter daughter, but this could have easily been him trying to assign guilt to his partner. He is the one who hogtied the family, and his emotions don't get stirred until the badly planned crime begins to unravel.

The film has a detachment of its own. When both men are hanged for their crimes, the movie ends with the title In Cold Blood, almost as if the picture were an unedited documentry. This is the right approach here. The movie does not moraliize, ever, but lets the crime and how the justice system deals with it speak for itself.

The director can be detached because he trusts you, as a viewer, will not.

4/5 Good film, misguided message
  by J. D. Best, author (Arizona)
Truman Capote invented the non-fiction novel with In Cold Blood. The movie is an honest representation of the groundbreaking book, a rarity for Hollywood. This is a good crime story, and a good film with exceptional acting and direction. It's semi-documentary style still holds the viewer's interest.

After extensive interviews, Capote got emotionally close to the murderers. The ex-cons, who had been recently paroled, brutally murdered an entire family in their home. This was a heinous crime. They may have been raised in families that make you search for a word stronger than dysfunctional , but they knew what they were doing and don't deserve the empathy shown by Capote. Joseph Wambaugh repeatedly interviewed the murders in The Onion Field, but managed to portray their hardscrabble background without being overly sympathetic.


4/5 Great book and great movie
  by Ashley Knoerr
In Cold Blood was a great book so I had to get the ORIGINAL movie - great job on the movie as well!

4/5 classic
  by John Anthony Mosby
Another classic, I just had to include this movie in my viewing diet, and it has now served its purpose. I retire it with satisfaction.

5/5 Two Killers, A Brilliant Crime Movie
  by John F. Rooney
"In Cold Blood" was a movie I hadn't seen since its 1967 theater release. I have read Truman Capote's brilliant non-fiction novel several times. In recent years I saw two excellent movies retracing Truman Capote's research into the Clutter murder case: "Capote" with Philip Seymour Hoffman and "Infamous" with Toby Jones. In "In Cold Blood" there is an actor (Paul Stewart) playing a rather pedestrian writer, but no flamboyant Truman Capote is in evidence.
The movie spends a great deal of time on Perry Smith (Robert Blake in a great performance) and Dick Hickok (Scott Wilson) in the lead-up to the murders and in their long journey to Mexico after the homicides. We first see aspirin-popping Perry getting off a bus with a heavy load of belongings, limping because of his still-painful leg injury from a motorcycle accident.
To say that Perry's family was dysfunctional would be an understatement. He was a decorated Korean War vet, but he was too much under the influence of Hickok who proved to be an effective scam artist, passing bad checks, raising money on the road when they are on their way to Mexico. It is for long stretches very much a road movie.
In this grimly photographed black and white movie, some people may find the flashbacks to Perry's past hokey, but they may be necessary because we don't get any revelations from him in the movie from the writer (Truman Capote) interviews because of a lack of journalist interviews in the movie.
John Forsythe as the lead investigator is shown in the investigation stages that are well-presented in a police procedural style.
Seeing the movie again after all these years, I found it somewhat disappointing, looser in construction than I remembered, but still a powerful statement. It was well-directed and extremely well-acted. In the intervening forty-two years movies of this type have come to be made differently; they are faster-paced for one thing. This movie, however, will remain a classic. Few movies in the crime genre have ever surpassed it.