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Learning Beyond the Classics
Directed by Richard Brooks
With Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe
Rated R, 134 minutes, DCP

Published in 1966, Truman Capote’s nonfiction account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in the farm town of Holcomb, Kansas, instantly became a phenomenon garnering support from critics and popular audiences alike. In Cold Blood also gave a schematic for how crime — its perpetrators, its victims, its cops, its violence, its followers — could be served to the general public with financial and critical success. The film adaptation, coming quickly on the heels of the book’s publication, both furthered the lore of the Clutter murders in the American psyche and showed how Hollywood studios could also find audiences and money in true crime adaptations.

Directed by Richard Brooks (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry), the film stars Scott Wilson and Robert Blake, himself a cog in the American true crime machine, with a documentary feel that pulls, in part, from the film being shot on-location in Kansas, including at the Clutter’s family farm.

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