Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch In Cold Blood
1967 · Richard Brooks · In Cold Blood on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the film cutting between the killers and the family. (cutting)
The opening cross-cuts the two drifters converging on Holcomb with the Clutters living through what looks like an ordinary day.
Payoff: You know a collision is coming, and the editing makes the waiting for it almost unbearable.
Watch how small the two men look against flat land. (camera)
Hall's wide frame isolates the drifters against sky and road, an empty, indifferent landscape dwarfing them at every turn.
Payoff: The land itself withholds shelter or explanation; there is nowhere for the men, or your eye, to settle.
Listen for silence before the jazz score finally enters. (sound)
Brooks favors flat ambient sound, wind, institutional quiet, so that Quincy Jones's sparse, nervous score registers as an intrusion when it arrives.
Payoff: The music feels like someone's private unease breaking into an otherwise documentary surface.
Notice the real diners, motels, and farmhouse furniture on screen. (staging)
Brooks shoots on actual locations, including the real Clutter house, producing rooms that look found rather than art directed.
Payoff: The plainness of these rooms does the work that period polish usually does in crime pictures.
Watch Robert Blake's face for wounded grievance, not menace. (performance)
His Perry Smith carries damage and a dreamy self-mythology in his posture and voice rather than in any obvious villainy.
Payoff: His face holds a feeling without turning it into a clear motive you can settle on. In the reading: qualisign (icon of quality). The reading calls this a qualisign: a quality held on a face, not yet discharged into any decisive act.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the cuts between the killers and the Clutters. The film keeps you counting the hours before they meet.