TCM Devotes Monday (Today) and Tuesday to the Father of “Hate” and a Most Convincing Screen Murderer: Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (1967) is being Screened on Monday Night, February 15, at 8 p.m. ET., and The Purple Gang (1960), Tuesday, at 5:30 p.m. ET; Both Pictures Star Robert Blake, Who Beat the Rap for “Allegedly” Murdering His Wife in 2001

By David in TN
Sunday, February 14, 2021 at 6:55:00 P.M. EST

TCM shows Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (1967) Monday Night, February 15, at 8 p.m. ET. Robert Blake and Scott Wilson play the two killers of a Kansas farm family.

Brooks bought the rights from Truman Capote and made the film as a vehicle opposing the death penalty. Brooks called the crime “senseless” and the execution of the killers “also senseless,” which “solved nothing.” Brooks built sympathy for Perry Smith (Robert Blake) in particular.

Brooks put a cynical reporter in the film, played by Paul Stewart. At the end, when Perry Smith is being hanged, Stewart bows his head and cries. The character constantly says the executions are the same as the murders. This trope has been used for over a century.

Robert Blake appears again on TCM Tuesday, at 5:30 p.m. ET in The Purple Gang (1960), a B picture about the Jewish Detroit prohibition-era gang. Blake certainly was convincing as a brutal murderer.

N.S.: Richard Brooks was a brilliant but maddening talent. He’d been a newspaper man, and then went Hollywood, and had early success writing pictures, though the pictures were obscure.

During the war while briefly in the Marine Corps (not in combat), he wrote a novel entitled The Brick Foxhole about “hate” in civilian life.

In the novel, a bigoted soldier who has just been “demobbed” (demobilized) murders a homosexual. However, in the movie version, the Production Code forbade making the sympathetic victim a queer, so he was changed into a saintly Jew, played by Sam Levene. The monstrous killer was played by Robert Ryan, who got his sole Academy Award nomination out of it. The movie version was called Crossfire (1947), and co-starred Ryan, Robert Young, and Robert Mitchum. Gloria Grahame also got an Academy Award nomination for a weird, brief role, in which she plays a prostitute whose perverse husband is her pimp. (If I understood what I was watching.)

Ryan and Brooks had both “served” together in the United States Marine Corps in soft jobs. Brooks showed Ryan either the book, or the manuscript for Foxhole, and Ryan said of the heavy, “I know that son-of-a-bi—h,” and made Brooks promise to reserve the role for him in the movie version.

In the picture, the Robert Young character, a police detective, gives an incredible speech about “hate,” in which his character tells of his father being beaten to death in a Southern town by Rednecks just for being Irish. He then extends his speech to deal with metaphysical “hate.”

So that’s where Morris Dees got his notion.

Brooks could be brilliant, awful, and uneven but very interesting. He was into adapting serious literature. He also oscillated between macho and women’s pictures.

In 1955, he made The Blackboard Jungle, in which well-meaning liberal high school teacher Glenn Ford is confronted with mostly White urban savages. It made “Rock around the Clock” a multimillion seller.

In 1956, in The Last Hunt, Brooks elicited one of Robert Taylor’s best performances, as a sadistic psychopath who slaughters an entire herd of buffaloes. In one of the greatest fight scenes ever, a drunken Stewart Granger, as Taylor’s friend and romantic rival, takes on an entire saloon, and credibly beats every man there.

Also in 1956, he directed but didn’t write Paddy Chayefsky’s slice-of-life drama starring Bette Davis, The Catered Affair.

In 1957, Brooks ruined Robert Ruark’s literary masterpiece on the tragedy of colonialism, Something of Value, giving it a forced, liberal, happy ending.

But the next year, he wrote and directed a visually and dramatically stunning version of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, getting the sort of performance out of Yul Brynner that I wasn’t aware he was capable of, and without destroying the religious faith at the heart of the story.