Trailer
Plot summary
Perry Smith, newly paroled and barred from setting foot in Kansas, rides a bus to Kansas City, Missouri, carrying his guitar and all his belongings. There he meets Dick Hickock, a former prison buddy who has written him about a perfect score. Dick learned from another inmate that Herbert Clutter, a prosperous farmer in Holcomb, keeps a safe holding about $10,000, and the plan is to rob the house and leave no witnesses. Dick drives a 1949 Chevrolet with a rifle in the backseat and an ailing father at home. The two stop in Emporia for duct tape, rubber gloves and nylon rope, then head west while the Clutter family goes about its routines.
Cast
- Ruth Storeyas Bonnie Clutter
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about In Cold Blood (1967)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Columbia Pictures wanted Paul Newman and Steve McQueen as Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, but Richard Brooks refused, feeling their fame would make the performances less believable; around 500 contenders were considered before relative unknowns Robert Blake and Scott Wilson were cast.
- In a prison-cell scene where Robert Blake's Perry Smith talks about his father, cinematographer Conrad Hall noticed during rehearsals that rain running down the window cast shadows on Blake's face that looked like tears, so Richard Brooks changed the blocking so the 'tears' stayed on his face throughout.
- When Truman Capote visited the set and met Robert Blake and Scott Wilson, the actors playing the killers he had known well, their resemblance to the real men shook him so badly that he went back to his hotel and drank an entire pint of Scotch whisky.
- The family who owned the real Clutter house in Holcomb, Kansas, where the murders took place, was paid $15,000 for the crew's four weeks of filming there.
- Denied permission to film inside Kansas State Penitentiary, the production rebuilt the execution-chamber interiors on Hollywood sets and bought the prison's leather execution straps, officers' uniforms and even the latrines from Smith's and Hickock's cells.
- Composer Quincy Jones visited the penitentiary where Smith and Hickock were held with Richard Brooks, and was inspired to write the score around two acoustic basses standing for the two killers' "demented minds".
- Scott Wilson got the role of Dick Hickock after being personally recommended by Sidney Poitier and Quincy Jones; the film was only Wilson's second feature and his first major part.
- Richard Brooks' temper on set was so volatile that Scott Wilson was frequently yelled at and once nearly walked off the film; Wilson called Brooks "a volcano who was going to erupt at some point".
