Volume 11, Number 1 · July 11, 1968
Violent Movies
By Frank Conroy
In Cold Blood
directed by Richard Brooks, produced by Richard Brooks
Bonnie and Clyde
directed by Arthur Penn, produced by Warren Beatty
If Richard Brooks is interested in art rather than in money, he should never have made In Cold Blood. One feels throughout the film that his heart wasn't in it: the mechanical, plodding pace of the editing suggests a director fighting his way through the material. He has sprinkled primer psychology throughout the script to explain Perry and Dick's behavior but it serves only to show that Brooks did not understand it—nor, for my money, did Capote. Most revealing was the attempt to make the picture 'authentic.' A vast amount of time and energy was spent on this irrelevant preoccupation perhaps for no other reason than to fill an otherwise empty script. Brooks has slavishly followed the structure of the book, a structure that was weak to begin with, consciously trying to create a cinematic equivalent of the 'nonfiction novel' with all its supposed authenticity. Yet even if there were such a thing as a 'non-fiction novel' its translation into film would presumably involve more than simple mimicry. The movie seems perfunctory, as if Brooks did not really direct it, but only organized it.
Review, 1599 words
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