In Cold Blood and Capote - Essay Example

Comparison and Contrast of In Cold Blood the book and movie, and Capote Movie. Introduction In Cold Blood the book, in Cold Blood and Capote the movies, the storyline does not change even a bit. The story revolves around investigative journalism dealing with the murder of Herbert Clutter in Kansas. Herbert was a highly successful farmer. Unfortunately, he was brutally murdered alongside his wife and two of their four children. Truman Capote wrote the book in 1966 after travelling to Kansas to try and unravel all that was behind the crime.

He investigated several local residents, investigators who were assigned to the case and other interested parties. Six weeks after Capote began working on the details of the crime, the killers of Herbert Clutter, his wife and two of their children, were finally captured. Capote then went ahead to write a book after his finding, which took him approximately six years to compile and complete. After its release, the book won several accolades and ultimately became the biggest crime seller and one of the greatest books of its type to be ever written.

This paper will compare and contrast the various settings, themes, styles and other issue that make In Cold Blood the book and the movie, and Capote the movie similar or different in various aspects (Pilkington 2). Contrast and Comparisons The obvious similarity that any reader would naturally draw is the fact the book and the two movies actually have the same plot and origin of the story. All are about Capote’s work of journalism, which covered the deaths of Herbert Clutter and members of his family.

It is worth noting that while the book was written time in 1966, the two movies, In Cold Blood and Capote, were produced in 1967 and 2005 respectively. The book was the first source of information in which the two movies are based. There, it follows that were it not for the book, there is minimal chance that the movies would have come to be. (Clarke 365). Perry Smith and Dick Hickok, the perpetrators of the crime, the people who broke into the farm house in Holcomb, are both covered extensively by the book and the two movies.

Truman Capote even went miles further to conduct interviews with the murderers, who had by then been nabbed by the security Authorities and later imprisoned. Specifically, Capote majors into Perry Smith, unearthing almost all the information about him and his background. Just as depicted in the two movies, Capote finds out that Perry is an articulate man with an extremely trouble history. It is seen that Capote even develops compassion for the convict. However, this feeling of compassion deeply conflicts with his desire to finish working on the book and thereafter disclose everything that he had gathered about the killings and the murderers.

Then there is the homosexuality issue that is covered in the two movies, but described as just befriending in Capote’s book. Clearly, it is in the interest of Capote to befriend Perry in a rather sexual manner in order to fool Perry into giving him all the information he needed. Along that path of befriending, Capote even gets a lawyer for him thereby postponing their execution though it did not take long before their execution was eventually actualized. Capote succeeds in getting all the information he required about the Kansas murders (Davis 44).

The incompetence of the police is also featured in all the three works involving the murder of Herbert Clutter and his wife and including two of their children. The perpetrators of the crime where almost getting into Mexico before they were caught. The distance in which they had travelled before reaching the Mexican border raises a lot of concern about the effectiveness of the police in containing crime in the United States of America. The police are reflected as incompetent as they could not trace the murderers of Clutter and his family immediately after they committed the crime.

Notably, they were later captured, imprisoned and later executed (Pilkington 6). Conclusion In Cold Blood the book and movie, and Capote movie are in all ways remarkably similar. It takes quite a sheer intelligent and conservative mind to single out any contrasts that may be appearing in all the three works under investigation. Perhaps the clear difference that emerges among them is the different –periods of time that they were produced. In Cold Blood the book and movie were both relatively released in a subsequent manner, with a period of a year separating them.

Capote the movie was produced much later in 2005 in an attempt to provide finer and clearer details than the previous versions of the same storyline. Works Cited Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1988 Carvalho, Capote. Plot Summary for Capote. 2005. Retrieved 30th April 2012.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379725/plotsummary Davis, Deborah. Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball. New York. Hoboken. 2006 Pilkington, Ed.

“In Cold Blood, Half a Century On.” The Guardian, 16th November, 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/16/truman-capote-in-cold-blood