Word: dicks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...COLD BLOOD. Richard Brooks has followed Truman Capote's harrowing anatomization of a multiple murder in Kansas with remarkable fidelity, and the performances of the unknown actors who portray the killers (Scott Wilson as Dick Hickock, Robert Blake as Perry Smith) lift the film to near brilliance...
...toughest and most developed program is at Chicago, which currently offers 17 courses, ranging from a seminar on Moby Dick to a study of the novel and urban imagination dealing with Dickens, Balzac and Fitzgerald. Along the way to their Ph.D.s, students must master, among other things, five fields of religious study, including the Bible and the history of Christianity, the position of one major modern theologian or the entire body of one major writer's work, and one classic of criticism-plus two foreign languages, usually German and French. The most harrowing obstacle is an oral examination during...
...craft to render reality. Through painstaking accretion of minutiae, In Cold Blood harrowingly anatomized a multiple murder and in the process brought literary life to six dead people. They were the four members of the prosperous Clutter family of Holcomb, Kans., and their killers. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, who were executed in 1965. Although the book was flawed by a seeming excess of sympathy for the criminals, it had the sweeping force and glare of high-beam headlights zooming down a forgotten country road. In Richard Brooks's film version, the candlepower is weakened, but the power...
...murders filmed in the room where they occurred. The director's greatest triumph, however, is his use of unknowns. With the exception of a handful of character actors in minor parts, and John Forsythe as a detective, no face in the film is fa miliar-least of all Dick's and Perry's. Thus, like obscure performers in a foreign film, they have no prior images to disturb the fragile illusion that they are not players but people...
...Perry, Robert Blake has the narcissistic good looks Capote described, with "the dark moist eyes" and bril-liantined black hair; he even appears to have "the stunted legs that seemed grotesquely inadequate to the grownup bulk they supported." Scott Wilson, as Dick, has the "long-jawed and narrow face tilted, the left side rather lower than the right," and the "American-style, good-kid" manner that can bounce a check or a baseball with equal ease. It is their performances that lift the film from documentary competence to near brilliance. In the end, the actors have become the criminals, understandable...