This 1967 film was nominated for four Oscars. Two of the nominations were for Richard Brooks for Best Director and Best Screenplay Bases on Another Medium. He lost the director award to Mike Nichols for The Graduate and the screenplay award to Stirling Silliphant In the Heat of the Night. Also nominated was Conrad Hall in the Cinematography category but he lost to Burnett Guffey for Bonnie and Clyde. A nomination for Best Original Music Score was given to Quincy Jones but that award went to Elmer Bernstein for Thoroughly Modern Millie.

The movie is an adaptation of Truman Capote's novel of the same name. Even though the book is classified as a novel, it is more non-fiction than fiction.

The story revolves around two small time ex-cons. Perry Smith (Robert Blake) and Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson) have recently been released from prison. These two individuals don't seem to be very intelligent and if they were by themselves, they probably would have been the same petty criminals they'd always been. Together, they are a deadly duo.

Perry is the dreamer of the two. He dreams of becoming a famous Country and Western singer. He also dreams about finding gold and buried treasure but, all through the movie, he's the more realistic of the pair when it comes to the crime they're planning. He's also a Korean War Veteran, wracked with pain because of a war injury. He's continually downing aspirin to ward off the pain.

Hickock learned from a prison buddy about a farmer in Holcomb, Kansas who had a safe in his house with ten thousand dollars inside it. Hickock picked up Smith at the bus station in Kansas City and they made plans to drive to Holcomb and find the safe in the Clutter family farmhouse. Perry worries that they don't have any stockings to put over their faces but Hickock boasts that they won't need them because they weren't going to leave any witnesses. It is nearly midnight when they arrive at the Clutter farm. Smith says to Hickock, "Let's get out of here. Now. Before it's too late."

The scene then changes to the following morning when friends stop by to pick up the daughter, Nancy Clutter, for church. In the next scene, police cars and ambulances roaring toward the Clutter farm. The whole beginning of the film employs ingenious interwoven changes between scenes.

We learn that all the members of the Clutter family have been killed and that four agents for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation have been assigned to the case. Agent Alvin Dewey (John Forsythe) heads this group. The middle of the movie follows the investigation of the crime by these agents and also the travels of Smith and Hickock.

The killers end up in Mexico but Hickock tires of it and they return to The United States. By this time the agents know who they are because Hickock's prison buddy has told officials about the stories he'd told him about the safe. They are arrested in Las Vegas and transported back to Kansas. It's during the drive back that we learn what happened at the Clutter farm.

For the sake of realism, In Cold Blood was filmed in Holcomb, Kansas at the Clutter farm where the actual murders took place as well as the other actual locations. At the trial portion of the film, six of the original jurors were used as actors in the jury box. When Hickock and Smith are hanged, the hangman you see is the same man who performed the real hanging.

Excellent acting performances are turned in by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson in this gripping drama.

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