In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood (1967) is Richard Brooks' true-crime drama, free to watch online on iFILM. Two ex-cons, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, drive to a Kansas farmhouse chasing a rumor of ten thousand dollars in a safe. There is no safe. By morning the Clutter family is gone.

Robert Blake and Scott Wilson play the killers as opposites bolted together: one twitchy and wounded, the other smooth and hollow. Conrad Hall shot the whole thing in grainy black and white, on the real roads and motels where it happened, which makes Kansas feel like a place where the verdict is already in. Brooks lays out the sequence plainly — the planning, that night, the run across half the country, the arrest, the death-row cell. Almost no score. Nothing pushing you to feel.

The script comes straight from Truman Capote's book, the one that more or less invented the nonfiction novel by reconstructing a 1959 murder from court records and Capote's own talks with the condemned men. The film was up for four Oscars, including directing and Conrad Hall's cinematography, and it still reads as one of cinema's coldest, clearest arguments against the death penalty — no pity for the killers, no satisfaction in watching them hang. Stream In Cold Blood (1967) online on iFILM.