I saw this film after watching Capote and Infamous. It is just incredible how the homosexual relationships between author and protagonists are sublimated in the movie. The reporter is straight, the protagonists are more beatniks than gay.<br /><br />The film starts slowly, but on reviewing it a second time, we get all sorts of interesting information from similes that the writer/director Brooks creates.<br /><br />Notice the incredible cutting at the beginning where killers and to-be-killed are linked. Cutter on the phone is matched-cut to Perry on the phone. Cutter washing his face is matched-cut to Perry washing his face. Only Perry's looking in the mirror and seeing his eroticized male body sets off a fantasy of his playing a guitar in Las Vegas to empty chairs. This failure/fantasy matches the failure-fantasy that Perry tells us about his father who built a beautiful motel in Alaska only to find it perpetually empty.<br /><br />Dick talks about shooting pheasants and the fact that the pheasants don't know that that they're going to die. we cut to the Clutters.<br /><br />Perry talks his dream about a yellow bird, "Taller than Jesus" who attacks the Nuns who have persecuted them. "The Nuns begged for mercy," he tells us, "But the bird slaughtered them anyway." The bird lifted Perry to paradise. Strangely, Perry says that he has an aversion to Nuns, God and Religion. This echoes later in his last words when he wants to apologize but does not know to whom.<br /><br />The director puts in all sorts of what-ifs and only-ifs.<br /><br />Nancy Cutter gets an offer to sleep at a friends house. She is holding a horse. Perry will comment on a picture of her and the house later on. Nancy can't sleep over at her friends' house because her boyfriend is coming over for dinner. The decision seals her fate.<br /><br />Perry talks of Bogart in "Treasure of Sierra Madre". But it is another Bogart picture, "Beat the Devil" which Truman Capote co-wrote, where a fictional treasure hunt is the McGuffin. But Dick knows that the protagonists of that film ended up with nothing. Dick wants the hard cash, the $10,000 he thinks is in the Clutter's safe, (which ironically turns out to be as much as a fantasy as Perry's Mexican Treasure.<br /><br />Cut to Herb Clutter signing a $40,000 life insurance policy. He's thinking about mortality at the moment. Ironically his mortality is about to end in a few hours. The insurance agent on behalf of the company wishes him a long life, again ironic when we know what will happen in a few hours.<br /><br />Dick has said that they wanted no witnesses so nobody would remember them. Later, in fact, it is because they eliminated all the witnesses that they were remembered.<br /><br />"There was one witness," the detective keeps telling Dick later. But was that witness the jail-house friend, Dick, Perry, Truman Capote, or God? The viewer becomes the witness after watching the movie.<br /><br />Fascinating film.