Word: hickock
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Joel Oppenheimer's play was written, certainly, with good intentions. Centering around three cowboy desperadoes crossing the Western plains, it seeks to bitterly expose the great American romance for what it was. Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, and Wild Bill Hickock sit on a raised platform (that's heaven, pardner) and from time to time offer "commercials" on "The Sixgun That Won The West," "The Indians of the Americas--A Veritable Tower of Babel," and such. The format is funny and the commercials (and their delivery) are for the most part very funny. Near...
...central impact of the mass murder lies in a double mischance; first, that Hickock and Smith should ever have found one another, each being the perfect complement in a mutuality predicated on a "big score"; second, that the Clutter family should have been chosen as victims, so incongruous a happening that it made Holcomb, Kansas, feel "like being told there...
...posturing gruffness of Holcomb's postmistress: ". . . the sane thing to do is to shut up. You live until you die and it doesn't matter how you go--dead's dead": to appreciate Mr. Clutter's Midwest-pastoral dream: "an apple-scented Eden"; to wince before the senior Hickock's A History of My Boy's Life submitted to a parole board. One could fault Capote for lingering on certain settings and phenomena dear to his heart; but the substantive backdrop of In Cold Blood is classic Americana on an encyclopedic scale, rendered with the compassion, grace, and humor expected...
...apostrophized in Perry's diary: "What is life? . . . It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." For Capote, the movements in the shadows that produced the lightning tragedy of the Clutter murder are the tremors of a nation. Smith and Hickock are neither judged for what they did, nor vulgarly presented as anti-heroes. With courageous and incisive honesty Capote focuses on the dynamics of the two personalities, but never lets the tensions and momentum of the killers' relationship obscure the outward drama their characters trigger...
...heartening, to say the very least, that the literary year which forced the inanity of Tom Wolfes tangerine-flakes on us has given us In Cold Blood as well. The America that Capote has suggested in his immortalization of Hickock and Smith engulfs the America which Wolfe and others have so stridently proclaimed as, indeed, it engulfs us all; those, who like a bright-eyed Capote in Holcomb, respond to this fact with interest and humility, will find In Cold Blood one of those rare documents which irrevocably focuses our attention on the facts and fate flying overhead