In Cold Blood Movie Vs Book Essay

The made for television film In Cold Blood is an attempt from the filmmakers to surpass the novel’s success and have already stagnated in the first attempt. The book it’s so well detailed and described that the image of the scenes and characters are fixed in the reader’s mind in an intense way that they will remember forever, finding not even necessary to watch the film. The moon was not so big and bright and in the film as it was described in the book in the night of the murder. All the tragedy that happened with Perry’s life was also set aside from the film, like in the day that his father pulled the trigger on Perry to end his life. Moreover, the style in which the book was wrote, divided in four chapters made the novel more exiting to read

and the film did not make clear the transition of these four chapters, which ended up less impressive. The details on the book, like when Perry was tying the victims was so clear in my mind that I almost heard Bonnie praying. As the book describes, “there, on her bed, that’s where we found Mrs. Clutter. She’d been tied, too. But differently – with her hands in front of her, so that she looked as though se were praying…”
The movie Capote has one big similarity with the novel, which is the way Capote explores the life and soul of the murder, Perry Smith.

In the novel Capote dedicated one whole chapter to describe mostly the personality and physical characteristic of Perry and the movie is basically showing Capote and Perry intimate relationship while Capote was getting valuable information from Perry. Capote compared himself with Perry in the movie and paraphrasing what he told his friend and colleague Nellie Harper Lee, he and Perry grew up in the same family, but he chooses the front door while Perry the back door. Another life tragic similarity present in the movie Capote is that both of their mothers had a tragic death. However, as Perry was promoted in Capote’s novel and there are people that demonstrate sympathy and feel sorry for all that went wrong in Perry’s life, the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman also earned people sympathy and the Oscar of best actor in the movie Capote. The movie humanized the journalist Capote that in the novel was only seen as an invisible professional, subjectively guided for the impartiality and objectivity of the facts. The actor Philip S. Hoffman showed that behind the professional journalist Truman Capote, subsist a controversial and confused human being that assumed a variety of personalities from sensitive to a cold capitalist man during these six years that he spent to write his

book.
Contrasting with today’s reality about journalism, the time Capote spent to write his investigative crime news article that culminates in the novel six years later seems uncommon for the journalism nowadays. Capote also contrasted with the parameters of the journalism back in 1960s where he wrote in a romance structure the best news article already made. He mixed the journalism with literature and romance with non-fiction which sounds ambiguous at first, but attractive and fascinating for the reader at last.
Capotes seemed more manipulator and dissimulated in the movie then in the novel. During the interview with the killers and specially Perry, Capote promised them that the information will be used to convince the reader that they were not only homicides or psychopathic, but two human being. However, Capote entitles his book of In Cold Blood, a title that did not sounded as a justification at all. No meter the permissive life or strategies used by Capote to obtain the right information from the characters, his novel revels his capacity to almost perfectly describe the reality in the novel, which the film In Cold Blood never achieved.