In this clip, the cinematographer Conrad Hall discusses a shot from In Cold Blood where the lighting took an particularly expressive function. This shot is a particularly fine example of the expressive power of lighting. This clip is taken from the documentary Visions of Light.
Herbert Clutter inspects his ranch on the morning of November 14, 1959. That same morning, on the other side of Kansas, Perry Smith meets up with Dick Hickock. While the Clutters go about their daily business, running errands and baking cherry pies, Hickock and Smith are tuning their car. After a long drive, they pull up to the Clutter home with a shotgun and knife in hand.
That morning, the bodies are discovered by Susan Kidwell and another of Nancy's friends. Initially, the police are baffled. Bobby Rupp is a suspect until he passes a lie detector test. Alvin Dewey, the KBI agent in charge of the investigation, thinks that the killer must be someone close to the family. Rumor sets the small town of Holcomb on fire. Hartman's Cafe is the center of numerous theories.
Meanwhile, Perry and Dick have returned to Dick's hometown of Olathe. Dick passes some hot checks, and the two flee to Mexico. Perry has always dreamed of finding sunken treasure in Mexico. While the investigation in Kansas begins to methodically follow up dead end leads, Perry and Dick spend some time entertaining a rich German tourist before they run out of money in Mexico City. While packing to return to the states, Perry goes through his personal belongings and remembers his childhood. His mother and father rode the rodeo circuit until they had a falling out. Perry was passed from home to home as a child. Now, two of his three siblings have killed themselves.
The investigation of the Clutter murders seems to be heading nowhere. However, a man in the Kansas state prison at Lansing, Floyd Wells, hears of the murder case. Sure that Dick Hickock is responsible, he begins to think of talking to the authorities. Meanwhile, Dick and Perry are hitchhiking in the American desert. They try to steal a car, but fail. By this time, Floyd has confessed, and Dewey and his team are beginning an elaborate manhunt.
Before they are caught, Dick and Perry steal a car, return to Kansas City, pass more hot checks, and take up residence in Miami. They eventually backtrack to Las Vegas, where a policewoman recognizes their license plate number. Dick confesses after intense questioning, and Perry follows suit. The trial goes smoothly, and the two are condemned to death.
During a five-year appeals process, Dick and Perry languish in Death Row. Perry tries to starve himself while Dick writes letters to various appeals organization. They are kept company by various appalling criminals. When death comes, Dick is awkward and Perry is remorseful.
Blake sits in the text and lets it do the heavy lifting. He describes a scarring event from his childhood, perhaps the event that led him to become a cold-blooded killer, but he doesn’t over-emote. He trusts in the text.
"We decided to shoot in black-and-white because we wanted to make it real; we were filming in the actual locations where the various incidents in the story had taken place, including the actual murder sites, and the use of black-and-white gave the film a heightened sense of truth without making things too lurid."
Hall's work on this film earned him his third Academy Award nomination and the undying admiration of cinematography buffs, who now view In Cold Blood as a nearly flawless achievement. The film offers a dramatic mixture of careful planning and on-the-spot inspiration.
Perhaps the most famous scene in the film presents a final speech by one of the killers (Robert Blake), who confides his feelings to a prison chaplain just minutes before he is executed on a rainy night. Among the many "happy accidents" Hall exploited during his career, this sequence stands alone in its brilliance. As the unemotional murderer reminisces to the chaplain about his unhappy relationship with his father, the drizzling rain outside the cell's window is reflected onto his face, forming a river of symbolic tears.
"It really was raining the night the two killers were hung," Hall recalled. "The warehouse where they were hung and Death Row were two locations in which we weren't allowed to shoot, so we had to recreate them. I wound up lighting this scene of a man about to be hanged, talking to a chaplain as rain was being created outside the window. The light from the prison yard was creating a dim, moody ambiance, and the chaplain was reading from the Bible by the light of a little desk lamp. The outside light was creating the penetration, and we used a wind machine to create some movement in the rain. But the machine blew a mist on the windowpanes, and after a certain point the mist became so heavy that it started to trail down. While I was lighting the scene, I noticed that the light from outside was shining through the water sliding down the window pane and projecting a pattern resembling tears on the face of Robert Blake's stand-in. I brought it to Richard's attention. In the finished scene, the acting, cinematography, direction and writing all come together to create a very memorable moment.
Summary ::: Richard Brooks wrote and directed this stark black-and-white (with brilliantly evocative cinematography by Conrad Hall) study of two drifters who murder a family, based on Truman Capote's non-fiction novel In Cold Blood. The film takes place in Holcomb, Kansas, where four members of the Herbert Clutter family are roused from their sleep and brutally murdered. The killers, Perry Smith (Robert Blake) and Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson), are two ex-cons who plan to rob the Clutters of $10,000 kept in a safe in their home. But Dick and Perry find no safe and no $10,000 and end up leaving the murder scene with only $43. The police, led by Alvin Dewey (John Forsythe) of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, try to track down the killers. Meanwhile, Dick and Perry take off to Mexico, where Perry has fantasies of prospecting for gold. But when his dreams of prospecting come to naught, Dick insists that they return to the United States. Confident that they have left no clues, they cash bad checks, and the police track them down in Las Vegas. During questioning, their alibis are broken when they are separated and tell conflicting stories. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi Robert Blake’s window monologue for the jailhouse scene comes on. He stands in a dark room next to a window, rain pouring. All of a sudden I notice what look like tears falling from Blake’s face, only they weren’t tears — they were shadows cast by the raindrops against the window. I was head over heels!
During this monologue, Perry stands at a window, where it is raining outside. The light reflections from the window look like tears running down his face: a beautiful and stark image. The Reverend in his cell with him has just asked if Perry would like him to send anything home.
Cinematographer Conrad Hall’s use of black-and-white film stock encloses the narrative in a time capsule that resonates with the period of the crime. The film’s most celebrated scene arrives moments before Perry is to be hung. Robert Blake’s troubled character gives a tragic monologue about his father to the jailhouse priest in the moments before he is to be hanged. A hard rain pours against the adjacent window allowing for a watery reflection on the left side of Perry’s face where sheets of tears seem to fall down. Quincy Jones’s boldly original musical score tempers the mood with an incalculable amount of emotional energy.