‘In Cold Blood’ Remake Lives Up To Chilling Book

The intensity of Eric Roberts and an evil smile playing across the face of Anthony Edwards make CBS’s “In Cold Blood” (tonight and Tuesday at 9 p.m.) an unsettling dramatization of Truman Capote’s best seller about two convicts who murdered a farm family in 1959.

As Perry Edward Smith, Roberts turns in a performance that could win an Emmy nomination. Edwards is betting that playing scar-faced Richard Eugene Hickock will expand his career beyond that of the good-guy physician he plays on NBC’s “ER.”

Both agree that the senseless murders in Kansas were the result of a synergy between two psychopaths who brought out each other’s worst traits.

“Truman Capote said that individually neither of them could carry out these murders,” said Roberts. “Capote’s observation was that together, Perry and Dick formed a third person capable of doing what neither could alone.”

Viewers may find the portrayals of the pair, particularly Smith, fairly sympathetic. There’s a light-hearted passage in which con artist Hickock sets out to outfit his friend in better threads.

There’s a more troubling scene, in a restaurant, in which Smith reveals serious psychological problems. And there’s another in which Smith fears he cannot stop these killings, even though he may become the perpetrator.

On assignment for The New Yorker, Capote arrived in Kansas just weeks after the murders and spent five years working on his book, which was published as soon as Hickock and Smith were hanged in 1965. (A film version, starring Robert Blake, was made in 1967.)

Like Capote’s account, the CBS movie cuts back and forth between the upright Clutter family and excons Smith and Hickock, who had heard from another inmate that there was money in a safe in the family’s house.

On the day of the murders, Smith, 31, and Hickock, 28, set out on a 400-mile drive to Holcomb, intending to rob and kill the family. At night, the two entered the farmhouse through an unlocked door.

As it turned out, the Clutters had no safe and only about $40 in the house. But Smith and Hickock proceeded, taking each of the four family members into separate rooms to kill them one by one.

They began with Herb Clutter, scheduled to be named Holcomb’s Methodist Layman of the Year; then his teen-agers, Kenyon and Nancy; and finally his wife, Bonnie, who listened in terror to the shotgun blasts that killed the others.

Herb Clutter’s friend, Alvin A. Dewey, a detective for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (played by Sam Neill), headed the search for the killers. Questioned after their capture, Hickock said Smith shot the Clutters; Smith said Hickock planned the murders and insisted they leave no witnesses.

Hickock is the emotionless partner who goes to his death in apparently good spirits, saying, “You’re sending me to a far better place than this one ever was.”

Smith, who wrote the songs that Roberts sings in the movie, turned out to be the one with a conscience, a man whose final words were to apologize.

“Perry had the ability to go off and explode and kill,” Edwards said, “but Capote pointed out that without Dick … it would never have happened.”