Truman Capote Crime Classics: In Cold Blood / Beat The Devil

Last Minute Sales & Specials

"In Cold Blood": At the end of the 1950s, in a more innocent America, the brutal, meaningless slaying of a Midwestern family horrified the nation. This film is based on Truman Capote's hauntingly detailed, psychologically penetrating nonfiction novel. While in prison, Dick Hickock, 20, hears a cellmate's story about $10,000 in cash kept in a home safe by a prosperous rancher. When he's paroled, Dick persuades ex-con Perry Smith, also 20, to join him in going after the stash. On a November night in 1959, Dick and Perry break into the Holcomb, Kansas, house of Herb Clutter. Enraged at finding no safe, they wake the sleeping family and brutally kill them all. The bodies are found by two friends who come by before Sunday church. The murders shock the small Great Plains town, where doors are routinely left unlocked. "Beat The Devil" is a witty, dry-humored, and well-plotted spoof of the classic capers popular at the time. The film, written by famed author Truman Capote, is centered on a group of four crooks played by Humphrey Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, and Gina Lollobrigida, all of whom are traveling to Africa under the guise of selling vacuum cleaners. Their true motivation for the trip is to get rich off uranium by smuggling it out of East Africa. Joining the group is a prim British couple claiming to run a coffee plantation there. It doesn't take long, however, for the couple to find themselves entangled in Bogart's devious scheme. But the trip doesn't go as smoothly as planned, and the Africa-bound band quickly learns that its means of transportation - a steamer - is malfunctioning. This is the first incident in a string of misadventures and double crosses that come to a head when the uranium hunters wind up facing death at the hands of an Arab firing squad, unless they can devise a plan to "Beat The Devil".