Where the cinema doesn't help By John Russell Taylor Film Critic Curzon:. In Cold Blood A strange idea of Richard Brooks to film Trutnan Capote's " non-fiction novel ". Not strange, of course, from the commercial point of view: there is nothing like a runaway best-seller to inspire confidence. But the story, as a story, is not aU that interesting. It is mysterious, in that the crime (four brutal murders for a financial gain of only 40 dollars) seems to have been very carefully prepared and yet based on information so hazy and vague that the feeling persists: surely there must have been more to it than that. But this mystery does not apparently interest Mr. Brooks, since in his screenplay he takes it for granted, neither trying to elucidate it nor drawing our attention to it for its own sake. No, clearly what Mr. Brooks has set out to do, with aU seriousness and no doubt every good intention, is to make the literal " film of the book". Which is the one thing no one could do. The essence of the book is not the story as a story not even the human interest of the twox, murderers and their predica- ment (they are romanticized a bit, but the tone remains cool and New Yorkerish throughout). but the sheer accumulation of detail. By the time we have finished the book we have a marvelously vivid (true'? who can say?) picture of the community in which the mur- dered family lived, the other people in the condemned block of the prison where Perry Smith and Dick Hickock spent their last days, and all the incidental characters who cropped up in the murderers' wanderings, the police investiga- tions (sometimes up completely blind alleys) and so on. Now obviously a film cannot do this. Even in two and a quarter, hours, it must concentrate, select, ruthlessly eliminate anything which is not " relevant ". It cannot match the rich profusion of the original and it cannot recognize a conception of relevance in which the surface matters more than the core. the periphery more than the centre. So what we are left with is a murder-odd but not specially interesting-a long flight by the killers, and the final catching-up of justice. The two new actors, Robert Blake and Scott Wilson, who play the principals-the heroes, indeed-are strikingly good. Some of the sequences on the road, like -the funny little sequence with the boy who collects Coca-cola bottles, are rather well done. But far too much is spoilt by overemphasis, deadly predict- able short cuts, expressionistic flashbacks, an over sedulous search for the obvious ironies of the situation (to many cheap lines meant to make us say "Ah, how little they know .-. . "). and the reduction of some characters, particularly the murdered family. to walking clichds, underlined by a score verging on self-parody. Curiously enough, though, all this, far from hopping the film up, dulls it down. The book was cool, long and absorbing; the film is overheated, not so long as films go these days, and decidely dull. There is one slight puzzle remain- ing. Though it is shot, excep- tionally, in quite ordinary-looking black-and-white, the credits say " Print by Technicolor ". Why ? Unless of course they have a colour print somewhere up their sleeves for eventual sale to colour television.... Carlton: Planet of the Apes Pierre Boulle's novel is of the sort that seems just too easy. Plant some human astronauts on a planet in which talking apes rule and mute humans are mere sub- ject animals, and then trudge through all the obvious reversals with the monkeys. constantly say- ing things like " The proper study of apes is apes " or being shocked at the revolutionary notion that the godlike gorilla might have evolved from something so huumble as man. In any case, the conception is heavily literary, and so likely to cause trouble to the would-be film adapter. Franklin D. Shaffner and his script writers, Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, seem painfully aware of the problems. Particularly Mr. Shaffner, whose solution is to over-elaborate any sequence which looks like old-fashioned action (the manhunt, the hero's abortive escape) in the vain hope that this will take our minds off how static and talky the rest of the film is He does, it is true, show us some very pretty pictures, particularly near the opening, with the space- craft's crash and the trek through the desert. And Charlton Heston does as much as possible to create a character for the hero where the writers have left a bare sketch. Consequently, the film is modestly entertaining and not too much of a let-down after such earlier films by Mr. Shaffner as Woman of Summer and The Best Man. But not all that encouraging either. Ritz: The Heroin Gang A dope ring tangles with the Mafia and innocent-looking under cover man David McCallurn fights both. His trail is quite bloody by the end, though all presumably in a good cause; practically every- one else is dead except Stella Stevens as a rather crooked but likable ex-mistress of the Mafia chief, whose trials seem out of proportion to her initial fall from grace. Brian G. Hutton has directed snappily, with little wast- age of word and action, and the set piece 6f smuggling in the middle is nicely tense: as Rififi, Topkapi, and others showed, there is nothing like detailing a criminal process to hold audiences spell- bound. Royalty: Coppelia Vulgar and patchy version of the balle't, partly shot as a straight transcription of a stage show, partly as "cinema" with dream interpolations, some of them, like the flamenco interlude, remote in- deed from the world of Delibes. The part of Coppelius is, oddly, mimed by an actor, Walter Sle- zek: the Swanilda/Coppelia is Claudia Corday of the Harkness Ballet and the Franz Caj Selling of the Royal Swedish Ballet. The film appears to have been made in Spain, and was written and directed by Ted Kneeland. Where the cinema doesn't helD