Capote / in Cold Blood Set [Blu-ray]

The double feature is the 1967 adaptation of Capote's chilling book of the same name (In Cold Blood) on a gruesome murder in "small-town" America and the outstanding 2005 release chronicling the life of perhaps the most enigmatic author of the post-World War II era.

This is one of the best examples of making two movies available at an affordable price. And what makes it particularly nice is they complement each other in an artistic, historical way. There is cinematic splendor in both and certainly a welcome addition to anyone's DVD library.

"Capote" (2005) is a brilliantly conceived and rendered movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman superb as Capote. Catherine Keener is novelist Harper Lee, Clifton Collins, Jr. is marvelous as killer Perry Smith, and Chris Cooper is Alvin Dewey, the chief investigator for The Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Occasionally Seymour can be faulted for excessive mimicry in his portrayal. The movie deals with the crucial part of Capote's life when he was researching his great non-fiction novel "In Cold Blood."
The movie starts with the vast open wheat fields and the Sunday morning discovery of Nancy Clutter's body by her girlfriend. When Capote shows up in the small Kansas town, a bit too much is made of Capote's flamboyant dress by the filmmakers; people weren't that primordial even in rural Kansas.
The movie shows the incredible access and trust he gained from everyone involved as he investigated the killing of the Clutters. It is not a flattering or favorable picture of Capote but rather a searing portrait of a self-absorbed and selfish writer who prized his book above the life of Perry Smith, a man who came to probably love him. Hickock and Smith were monsters of one sort, but Capote is pictured as being a monster of another sort. The movie makes short shrift of Hickock because Capote had less access to him.
We see views of Capote at New York cocktail parties entertaining his fellow guests, showing off, being vain, and petty and later flippant when he is recounting the gory details. Truman's relationship with his boyfriend is strained by his single-mindedness and callousness toward the condemned men.
The movie cuts back in forth between Capote in Kansas investigating and his periods in Manhattan writing or party-going. During the five and one half years of this case he was an obsessed man working on his greatest work.
Harper Lee, his friend, and herself author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" came to realize how selfish and cold-blooded he was in his pursuit of the story. This movie could have also been called "In Cold Blood" but referring to Truman rather than to the brutal murders. His desperate need for the story drives him to heartless acts and the brutal manipulation of Perry. Truman says to Harper about Perry, "He's a goldmine. When I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe." Later Truman says, "There was nothing I could do to save them," and Lee says, "You didn't want to save them."
Perry, anxiously awaiting the appeals, presses Truman to tell him the title of his book, but Truman prevaricates because he knows the title will upset Perry. Capote is unscrupulous, will do anything, hoodwink anyone to get his story. The crucial last piece he needs is the actual description of the murders by Perry.
At the very end of the film Truman's human emotions get the best of him. It's a brilliant piece of movie-making. See my review of "In Cold Blood" elsewhere on Amazon.

This double-feature DVD of CAPOTE and IN COLD BLOOD is a handy (and cheap!) way to get two top-notch movies relating the same events with different viewpoints and in very different ways.

As many of you surely know, IN COLD BLOOD the 1967 movie was based on IN COLD BLOOD the book, Truman Capote's phenomenally successful 1966 account of a horrific mass murder in little Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 and the aftermath the killers faced. (Capote insisted on calling his work, oxymoronically, a "non-fiction novel"). By contrast, CAPOTE is a slightly fictionalized 2005 movie spanning the same time frame (1959 and the Clutter family murders to 1965 and the killers' executions). In essence it's an extended "telling of" account with Truman Capote front and center as its lead character, whereas IN COLD BLOOD author Capote stayed journalistically behind the typewriter and out of the original book, as did his research assistant, Nelle Harper Lee, who would go on to become a sensation in mid-1960 with the publication of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. In CAPOTE, mirroring the actual events, Capote and Lee form an investigative duo who scope out Holcomb and the county seat, Garden City, and speak with those who knew the slain.

IN COLD BLOOD the 1967 movie was fairly successful but at the time, though one criticism surprises me: that Alvin Dewey, lead of the K.B.I. team investigating the murders, was a "composite" that included his fellow investigators Church, Duntz and Nye. Actually, all four characters are represented in ths movie, though it's true the Forsythe/Dewey character performs many of the tasks that were in reality performed by others. Note that nearly 40 years later CAPOTE, and its putative rival 2006's INFAMOUS, both relied on the same consolidation of several different investigators into the same character. IN COLD BLOOD the original hardback release had 343 pages; and the standard-run movie of the same name would have had a screenplay of probably no more than 150 pages. Maybe the critical butterflies had to do with the original book's queasy status as a work of reportage and a novel both. After all, Hollywood had been abridging novels like THE MALTESE FALCON or THE GRAPES OF WRATH with impunity for decades, and continues to do so, as in the two recent Capote biopics. If anything, Forsythe's solid but distinctly non-operatic acting style has held up well, as has the semi-documentary, black-and-white composition and editing of the film.

Verisimillitude (or *verismo*) has accrued to IN COLD BLOOD the movie over the years because most exteriors and real-life locales had not changed notably in the eight years between 1959 and 1967. Other than dressing the street with vintage cars, and costuming in slightly out-of-date fashions, reality could be filmed at no extra expense. For example, the "celebrated expresses" (to use Capote's term) Super Chief and El Capitan were filmed speeding through Holcomb, KS on the Santa Fe main line in 1967 as they had in 1959--in later films, it had to be faked.

CAPOTE--though it had to be filmed as an historical piece--is a smooth production. By and large the supporting cast is made up of "actorly" actors like Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., and Chris Cooper. Even the title character, while indubitably a film star, is also a renowned actor -- Philip Seymour Hoffman, who here is given the challenge of playing a high-voiced, effeminate man considerably shorter than he.

In retrospect, IN COLD BLOOD also achieved a coup in casting Robert Blake, the 1930s child actor who grew up to be a short-statured and somewhat baby-faced adult character actor -- a virtual dead ringer in looks and height to Perry Smith. While I don't object to Philip Seymour Hoffman getting the Oscar for his portrayal of Capote in CAPOTE, I urge viewers to see the following year's INFAMOUS (2006), with Toby Jones playing a wonderful re-creation of the Tiny Terror, and much, much closer to the real Tru's height.

All in all, there's a lot of pleasure to be had out there--this is a good duo to start with.
IN COLD BLOOD movie: *****
CAPOTE movie: ****
Value of combo: ***** (averages to 4.67 rounded to 5 stars)

Reading IN COLD BLOOD the original book: Priceless!

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