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A Chilling Retelling of ‘Cold Blood’

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On Nov. 15, 1959, a battered, black Chevy races across the flatlands of western Kansas like an angel of death. Inside are former prison cellmates Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, anticipating the big score ahead, closing the gap between them and their unsuspecting victims.

CBS is sending big-budget revivals through the turbulent November ratings sweeps. First came “Titanic,” and now in waters just as treacherous comes “In Cold Blood,” an admirable two-part remake of a chilling 1967 movie drawn from Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” about Hickock and Smith and members of the Clutter family they surprised in their beds and murdered.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Nov. 23, 1996 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday November 23, 1996 Home Edition Calendar Part F Page 14 Entertainment Desk 1 inches; 28 words Type of Material: Correction
Wrong crime--A reference to Caryl Chessman in Howard Rosenberg’s Friday column mistakenly described him as a killer. In fact, he was executed in 1960 after being convicted of rape and kidnapping.

Four shotgun blasts ending four lives.

The Clutters’ fate and the subsequent print and movie accounts of what happened seemed especially frightful at the time. That director Jonathan Kaplan and teleplay writer Benedict Fitzgerald can generate horror from a new “In Cold Blood” today--as they do--is an especially sizable feat given the bloody crimes now hemorrhaging all over the airwaves courtesy of TV news, making gore and violence seem almost routine.

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It’s a challenge to hold a viewer with mayhem when every night is crime night. The Clutter murders have nothing on the massacres spurting nightly from newscasts, nothing on the Menendez brothers slaughtering their parents or on the ghastly knifings of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman that again are resonating in a local courtroom.

The new “In Cold Blood” meets the challenge, yet joins the original movie in failing to decode the homicidal mind so that we may understand how Hickock and Smith, without cause or anything to gain, could end the lives of strangers trussed in their nightclothes almost as impersonally as squishing bugs.

They had traveled across the state and murdered for $41.

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Herb Clutter was a prominent farmer in tiny Holcomb, Kan. Although two older daughters lived elsewhere, still at home with Clutter and his wife, Bonnie, were their son, Kenyon, 15, a typical teenager who sneaked smokes behind his parents’ backs, and another daughter, Nancy, a popular 16-year-old who loved riding and 4-H, baked award-winning pies, played the clarinet, planned to attend Kansas State University and was peeved at her father for asking her to break up with her Catholic boyfriend. The Clutters were Methodist.

How freakish that a rural family that could have posed for Norman Rockwell should intersect with degenerate Kansas parolees Smith and Hickock, the latter having been tipped in prison by a fellow inmate about a wall safe with $10,000 that Herb Clutter was supposed to have kept in his office at home. It was this tip, which was erroneous, that late on the evening of Nov. 15 brought Hickock and Smith to the farm of the Clutters.

You’re uneasy watching the inevitable: After the family turns in for the night, the 1949 Chevy slides up and the grisly work begins, murders for which Hickock and Smith would be hanged in 1965 after spending nearly five years on death row being kept alive by appeals.

Minus commercials, the new “In Cold Blood” runs about a half hour longer than the earlier Richard Brooks feature, enough space for TV to amply widen his movie’s slender picture of the Clutters prior to their deaths. Critics of Capote accused the writer of getting too close to his subjects, whose gravestones he wound up paying for. And indeed, the original movie’s only major flaw was its ending, which became a polemic against capital punishment, appearing to equate the state’s “murder” of Hickock and Smith with their crimes against the Clutters. In contrast, TV’s “In Cold Blood” refrains from making the gallows its soapbox.

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Otherwise, the differences are largely stylistic, although the Brooks film is unclear about who did all of the shooting (it was Smith), and the CBS version has the pair being noisy enough to wake all of Kansas after entering the Clutter house through an unlocked door, to say nothing of warning their targets upstairs.

TV’s “In Cold Blood” begins drowsily, seeking to build suspense in slowly erasing the miles between the killers and their victims as the doomed Herb Clutter (Kevin Tighe) and his family go about the unhurried routine of their lives. Unhampered by commercial breaks and a two-night intermission in mid-story, the Brooks film has in its favor a snappier pace than TV’s “In Cold Blood.” And also a jazzy score by Quincy Jones and black-and-white filming in austere Holcomb (the murders were filmed inside the actual Clutter house) that throws ominous shadows across the screen, producing a film noir inkiness that’s lacking in the TV version, which was shot in Canada, naturally in color.

The new “In Cold Blood” yields scorching performances, with Anthony Edwards (Dr. Mark Greene of NBC’s “ER”) as Hickock and Eric Roberts as Smith matching the fine work of their movie counterparts, Scott Wilson and Robert Blake, respectively.

That’s hardly stunning from Roberts, whose movie career rises from a bedrock of twisted characters, although none more complex and ambiguous than Smith. Roberts plays him to the hilt as equally gnarled in body and mind, tormented by childhood memories, and someone whose fixation on good grammar and spasms of gentleness (he tried to make Herb Clutter more comfortable before shooting him, and later told police he liked him) belie his role as trigger man.

Edwards, however, is cast here against type, given his strong identity as a pristine hero in “ER.” A similar aura of goodness undermined Alan Alda as brutal killer Caryl Chessman nearly 20 years ago in a TV movie that ran when Alda was still likable Hawkeye Pierce in “MASH.” Yet Edwards is more easily separated from “ER,” so persuasive is he as Hickock, the glib premeditator of the shootings. “No witnesses, ‘member?” he keeps urging Smith.

The murders are presented almost surrealistically, but vividly enough to impart some of the terror that the Clutters must have felt as, one by one, they awaited execution in separate rooms. Afterward, Hickock and Smith fled to Mexico, then returned to the United States, still drifting and destitute.

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Part 2 is largely the hunt and capture led by Alvin Dewey (Sam Neill) of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, a serpentine odyssey winding toward Hickock and Smith ascending the gallows separately in the wee hours of an April morning, now looking more pathetic than evil, the mystery of why they committed senseless murder becoming their legacy.

* “In Cold Blood” airs 9-11 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday on CBS (Channel 2).

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