ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 23, 1996 TAG: 9611260005
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
Eric Roberts and Anthony Edwards star in CBS remake based on Truman Capote's best seller about the 1959 murder of a Kansas family
THE intensity of Eric Roberts and an evil smile playing across the face of Anthony Edwards make CBS' ``In Cold Blood'' (Sunday and Tuesday nights at 9 on WDBJ-Channel 7) 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. He came away concerned about people like Smith who suffer from inadequate or malevolent parenting.
Edwards is betting that playing scar-faced Richard Eugene Hickock (with crew-cut hairpiece) will expand his career beyond that of the good-guy physician he plays on NBC's ``ER.'' He came away from his ``Cold Blood'' experience even more opposed to capital punishment.
Both agreed 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.''
And yet, a viewer may find the portrayals of the killers, particularly Smith, are fairly sympathetic, despite what they did. 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 occurred and spent five years collecting information and doing interviews for his book, which was published as soon as Hickock and Smith were hanged on a gallows in 1965. The book - part psychological thriller, part documentary - spawned a genre that he called the ``nonfiction novel.''
Like Capote's account, CBS' movie cuts back and forth between the upright Clutter family and ex-cons 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, 48, scheduled to be named Methodist Layman of the Year in Holcomb; 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 in the miniseries 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.
Director Jonathan Kaplan saves the slayings until the second night, laying the groundwork for the interaction between the killers and their victims and looking at the killers' personal histories.
In 1967, Robert Blake and Scott Wilson starred in a critically acclaimed film based on the book.
``Robert Blake was great,'' Roberts said. ``I had to play the Perry I found in my homework and stay as far away from his portrayal as possible. I'm as proud of this work as anything I've done since 1983,'' when he played a killer in ``Star 80.''
Smith, the son of a Cherokee mother and Irish father, both alcoholics, grew up mainly in institutions, including a Catholic orphanage where he was punished for bed-wetting.
Gimpy with legs multiply broken in a motorcycle accident (he gobbles aspirin by the handful in the movie), Smith tells Dewey that Smith's father tried to shoot and kill the son. News reports mentioned that Smith's brother and one sister killed themselves.
``Perry was so terribly damaged, so dependent on Dick's company, he just did what he had to do to keep this little two-man family together,'' Roberts said.
Hickock, father of two, was a thief and con man. His mother told investigators that his incarceration at the Kansas State Penitentiary had hardened him. His face was scarred, the result of a car accident. According to news reports, he suffered headaches and fainting spells. In the film he faints shortly after being arrested.
Hickock admiringly calls Smith, who Roberts said earned a Bronze Star for his military service, ``a natural killer.'' Yet 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.''
But Edwards, referring to the real-life nun portrayed in ``Dead Man Walking,'' said the hanging was ``truly barbaric. I am a true Helen Prejean-er. I'm really against the death penalty. I find it horrific that people think more violence will curb violence. It never has, and it never will.''
Smith, who wrote the songs that Roberts sings in the story, 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.''
LENGTH: Long : 103 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Eric Roberts (standing) and Anthony Edwards have theby CNBleading roles in ``In Cold Blood,'' airing Sunday and Tuesday at 9
p.m. on WDBJ-Channel 7. color. KEYWORDS: 2DA