This 1967 movie, based on the “New Journalism” book and approach by Truman Capote, is starkly photographed in black and white, and stark in every other respect as well. Richard Brooks directs, and co-wrote the adaptation himself, which explains all the inventive but never jarring cross-cuts and imagery. It’s the story of the 1953 murders of a Kansas farm family in 1953 – a murder which, in attracting news media and stunning the nation with its meaningless brutality, was to that decade what the Manson murders were almost a generation later. The convicted killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, are played, respectively, by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson – and Blake, the former Our Gang kid from the 1930s and 1940s (and the former Baretta from the 1970s), is amazingly intense, and credible, as Smith.