In Cold Blood

WEARING spectacles of the wrong prescription usually results in a headache. Likewise, the near-sighted squint with which In Cold Blood inspects its subject matter only strains the viewer. With meticulous regard for detail the film attempts to relate the facts surrounding the murder of the Clutter family by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. Drawing from Truman Capote's research, the film version of his book reproduces the chilling aspects of this so-called "senseless" crime--the paradoxical motives of the killers, the inability of social conventions to adequately explain the atrocity, and the irony by which the state executes the killers for reasons as circumstantial as those which prompted the crime.

The film, in pursuing the train of events rather than an understanding of them, frustrates but also entices the audience. It takes fragmentary and superficial perspectives and with relentless music keeps up an arbitrary pace. The film consciously seems to pattern the conventional crime film, down even to the priest on death row. With maddening coyness, In Cold Blood is constantly implying that it knows more than what it is letting out.

The small, forgettable characters which fill this film are mere puppets in the hands of a Capote and the director. Characters are established by details, the story is constructed in fragments.

NEITHER Hickock nor Smith have any interest in the world beyond their illusory glories. The film manages to keep the killers apart from the guilt of the crime. The guilty party is a third person, created by the challenges Hickock and Smith defy the polarities of sanity and insanity. It is said that neither of them would have committed the act alone. Against their insensitivity, the mechanistic judicial system, with its $300-a-head hangman, bears a brutality of its own.

The puzzling tragedies of the killers are distorted by distracting practices of the camera, which fastens itself on details and on nothing else. At one moment it takes a coldly distant perspective and at the next becomes the eyes of one of the characters. Too many points of view, too many exacting detail counts substitute trivia for what could be absorbing and coherent action. Perhaps these failings are the result of an attempt to film precise history (even though it may not even be good history). Scenes succeed each other for no apparent reason except to suggest a superficial contrast. For instance, one of Smith's fantasies (which are filmed without a special lens) features an empty room similar to a shot of the court room. No connection can be made out of that. Scenes are spliced together with the same indiscriminate flair for incongruities for incongruity's sake. One should see this film without expecting any deep probes; it is a disturbingly mute film. Its weaknesses are similar to the weaknesses of the killers themselves: It has a unique, if not overwhelming, personality of its own.