OSCARS '67: In Cold Blood
Ambition doesn’t necessarily equal success.
CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of murder, abusive husbands, abuse of power, abuse against women, violence, hanging, death penalty, true crime.
For our final film in the Oscars ‘67 series, we’re tackling a movie that’s both ahead of its time but also not artful enough to make its point in a solid way. Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel invented the true crime genre, and this film brought it, along with neo-realism, to the big screen. But the closer this movie hewed to Capote’s story and the details of a Kansas murder, the more it rode into the uncanny valley. Robert Blake and Scott Wilson are making incredibly unique and interesting acting choices, but it doesn’t feel like they know how they relate to each other. The movie focuses so much on the details, the timeline, the plot, that it just completely misses the emotional weight this story offers. We finish our series with In Cold Blood (1967) this week on Macintosh & Maud Haven’t Seen What?!
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Intro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive.
Excerpt taken from “In Cold Blood,” composed and conducted by Quincy Jones. Copyright 1967 Colgems Records, Inc.
