Word: crime
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
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...
...Primal Crime. In a new book called The Religious Imagination (Bobbs-Merrill; $5.95), Rubenstein presents a historical and psychoanalytical study of how the Jewish religion has been a source of spiritual strength. The focus of his interest is the influences that shaped the Haggada-the body of legend and myth contained in the rabbinical Talmud. Rubenstein accepts Freud's thesis that the God of Genesis actually grew out of guilt felt for a "primal crime," in which primitive men cannibalistically devoured their fathers out of both jealousy and a desire to identify with them; in time, the father image...
...Being Earnest opened with Dame Flora Robson, and Hay Fever opens this week. Producers have even harked back to such antiques as The Bells, a Victorian melodrama in which Sir Henry Irving made his reputation, and John Galsworthy's hoary Edwardian relic, Justice, a preachy treatise on crime and punishment...