The Black Bird (1975)

A bkack & white still but the movie was in color.

A sequel to the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon (there were one or two earlier films based on it). Someone owned the movie rights and wanted to make a straight sequel, but the writers just couldn't do it so they wrote it as a comedy. Made 34 years after the first movie. I saw it listed in an old movie-related edition of the Guiness Book of World Records as the longest gap between an original movie and its sequel, although, since then, there was a made-for-TV sequel to Gone with the Wind and probably several others.

Lee Patrick reprises her role as Effie, Sam Spade's secretary, and Elisha Cook returns as Wilmer. Humphrey Bogart was only a couple of years older than they were. He would have been 75 when this movie was released and probably could have starred in it if he hadn't smoked his way to an early grave. So George Segal starred as Sam Spade, Jr, still employing his father's old secretary. I was disappointed that Elisha Cook didn't have a bigger role.

You know in the old movie when Wilmer tells Sam Spade to "shove off" and Sam warns him that "People lose teeth talking like that"? That scene was in the novel, but Wilmer apparently said "Fuck you". The way Dashiell Hammett had to put it in the book was, "The boy said two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second 'you'." 

In 1975, Wilmer could have said what he wanted, but the movie would have gotten an R rating. Ted Turner colorized The Maltese Falcon in the '80s, but if he really wanted to modernize it, he should have dubbed in the obscene language. 

Not really funny. It had a running gag about Sam Spade's last name being a racial slur. 

Free on Tubi.

The Hunt (Spain, 1966)

Never go rabbit hunting with pro-Franco Spaniards. 

If you want to see poor, innocent rabbits horribly killed and a lamb being skinned, this is the movie for you. It looked like a nice place. They go into a Spanish town that looked beautiful except they were skinning a lamb. 

Three middle age Spanish Civil War veterans and a younger fellow with a Polaroid go rabbit hunting. They were friends before this but don't seem to like each other.  

It was refreshing to see a .22 rifle as a murder weapon. People kill each other with them all the time in real life, but you never see that in movies.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Life for Ruth aka Walk in the Shadow (UK, 1962) Patrick Magoohan

Cretinous Christian Scientist (Michael Craig) lets his daughter die because he doesn't believe in blood transfusions. His wife (Janet Munro) wants to save her but they let him murder her. The doctor (Patrick McGoohan) was going to do the transfusion anyway but the guy in charge of the hospital stops him. 

"She CAN'T be," the Christian Scientist says confusedly when told she's dead.

The doctor wisely gets him prosecuted for manslaughter. You could do that in Britain apparently, hire a solicitor to have a guy prosecuted.

Set in the UK when the place was finally starting to claw its way out of post-war poverty.  The place looked a lot better than in more recent movies. 

Well-made but a bit mealy mouthed. It showed both sides, why we should be open-minded about a callous simpleton murdering his daughter although it did tend to side with the doctor.

Free on Movie Vault and YouTube.

Konga (UK, 1961) Directed by John Lemont

Dr Charles Decker (Michael Gough) invents a serum that turns an adorable baby chimp, Konga, into a hulking killer gorilla. One of those movies where people use miracles of science and nature for stupid things. The professor uses the gorilla to kill the university president who demands that he stop his crazy experiments and to murder college boy Bob Kenton (Jess Conrad) who has become his romantic rival when the prof shows an inordinate interest in Sandra (Claire Gordon), a perky co-ed. In fairness, the young fellow tried to strangle the prof and would have killed him if hasn't snapped out of his murderous rage. But the prof smacked him first.

I think this is more teaser than spoiler so I'll give away the ending. Decker's wife, Margaret (Margo Johns), overhears her husband hitting on Sandra. She hypnotizes Konga to follow her commands, injects it with more growth serum and turns the gorilla into a giant monster who walks through the streets carrying terrified Dr Decker in its sweaty fist.

"KONGA! LET ME DOWN! HELP! HELP!"

At the police station, the chief hangs up the phone and tells the two detectives, "Fantastic! There's a huge monster gorilla that's constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose on the streets! He's moving toward the embankment area." He shouts into the intercom. "Contact all available patrol cars! Have them come into headquarters and equip them with arms immediately! Get my car ready! I'll be right down to issue further orders!" Then to one of the detectives: "Contact Commissioner Garland at his home. Notify him of the emergency! Then call the War Office! Tell them what's happening and request they rush armed troops to the embankment area! I'll give them the position on radio telephone!"

British cops were much more decisive than Americans would be.

In color. It was great.

The Reckless Moment (1949) Max Ophuls

In 1949, I don't know what your best bet would be if you found a dead guy behind your house. I assume police weren't that smart back then. Even if you did nothing wrong, you might be better off dumping the body somewhere. 

The mother (Joan Bennett) in a fairly wealthy family drives to Los Angeles and to confront her 17-year-old daughter's middle-aged criminal boyfriend (Shepperd Strudwick). I don't know what the laws were back then, but statutory rape wasn't mentioned. The criminal offers to break up with the girl if the mother pays him off. 

The daughter (Geraldine Brooks) doesn't believe it when the mother tells her what he said. The daughter meets him in the boathouse. He doesn't deny telling her mother this but says it was just a ruse to get money out of her. The girl struggles with him and wisely hits him on the head with an object and runs back to the house. The geezer falls through an inadequate railing and is impaled on an anchor. The mother finds him in the morning, drags his carcass to the family's small boat and dumps him in a swamp.

The body is quickly discovered and identified. A young James Mason soon appears with a stack of love letters the daughter sent the dead fellow and threatens to hand them over to police. He'll sell them to the mother for what was then a very large sum of money.

What follows could have been an expose on sexist 1940's lending practices. Her husband is away on business and she has to scramble to raise the money. It would have been cheaper and within her means to send her daughter out of the county, send her to Berlin where her father was. She could lie low for a while.

It's a Christmas movie set during the holiday season with an important lesson for teenage viewers.

Even in a wealthy family, the tween son (David Bair) had to share a room with his grandfather (Henry O'Neill). 

The film reportedly got bad reviews at the time but is now considered one of Ophul's best movies.

Free on Tubi. 

The Badge, the Bible, and Bigfoot (2019) Ashley Hays Wright

I fell asleep with the TV on. Woke up some time later to find this playing, The Badge, the Bible, and Bigfoot. I backed it up to I could see the whole thing. It was 66 minutes. It had five actors playing six characters.

The mayor and police chief of a small coastal town go into the woods looking for three missing girls. There've been a lot of bigfoot sightings, so they naturally assume they were abducted by bigfoot.

Made by the Wright family, Ashley Hays Wright, David Owen Wright and their daughters, Jaina, Scout and Cadence. They've made over 60 movies in less than seven years, most of them filmed around their home in Texas. They took a trip to Maine, apparently. 

We see shots of the town of Eastport. They have a town council meeting which is just a close-up up the police chief as he hears it announced that the police department is being disbanded to give more money to the fire department. The sheriff will take over policing the town. 

The sheriff was played by David Owen Wright who also played the police chief, but all the shots of him as sheriff are either from the neck down or with the brim of a large hat hiding his face and he speaks in an odd cartoon-like voice. They could have avoided all that and it might have been better if the sheriff had been the police chief's estranged, perhaps evil twin brother. 

The bigfoot was one of them in an inexpensive gorilla costume, which is ironic since they made an anti-Halloween movie.

It started out looking pretty good with shots of the town, old wooden and brick buildings. The locations later in the film were less interesting. The editing became choppy toward the end.

And, I'll give away the ending here. Don't read if you want to be surprised.

It ends with the couple in their living room. The husband had fallen asleep watching TV and dreamed the whole thing, He watches violent movies to help cope with his war trauma. He resolves to stop watching violent movies which seems reasonable. I don't know if it means anything that he dreamed he was single and that his children were strangers to him.

I've seen only a small part of their body of work, but I would encourage the Wrights to take more trips. Airfare is going up with the war of aggression against Iran, but they could be European filmmakers. They could film in western Ukraine if they wanted. The other movie I saw of theirs, Exorcism in Amarillo, was just the five of them filmed around their house. It couldn't have cost anything. They could make a movie anywhere in the world for cost of airfare and the price of an Airbnb. 

Teenagers Battle the Thing (1959)

This was reportedly a regional horror film that was only shown locally. Filmed in Ontario, California. I don't know what it cost. It's possibly it still made a profit. Years later, they shot more material, added narration and released it as Curse of the Bigfoot (1975). which is sort of interesting because Curse of the Bigfoot was in color and the version of Teenagers Battle the Thing on Tubi is black & white.

Teenagers looked really old in the 1950's and the boys in this movie were taller than the adults. High school kids go with their teacher to help out on some archeological excavation which leads to the discovery of a mummified ape-like creature that comes to life. 

They should have had the creature kill a few teenagers. The poor thing didn't seem like much of a threat. It was an astonishing scientific discovery far beyond anything they could have ever imagined, and I won't give it away, but look at what they did to it.

The landscape was impressive.

Free on Tubi.

The Killing of Sister George (Robert Aldrich, 1968) Beryl Reid, Suzanna York

Beryl Reid stars as British actress June Buckridge who plays kindly Sister George, a 50-ish district nurse in a British soap opera. She's played the role for four years and is so identified with the character that her nickname is "George".

Meanwhile, George's relationship with her younger live-in girlfriend (Suzanna York) is on the rocks. 

Producers of the soap opera plan to kill off Sister George in a sudden, violent accident, a little like Charlie Sheen's demise in Two and a Half Men, something they'd be sure she couldn't come back from. This is in part because the drunken actress forced her way into the back of a taxi and assaulted two nuns. George is offered a voice-acting role in a BBC children's series, something a lot of older actors do now. George Segal was the voice of Dr Benton Quest in a Johnny Quest reboot before his come-back as a sit-com actor.

Based on a play that was presented as a black comedy. The movie was advertised as a "shocking drama". 

Director Robert Aldrich made this and a few other movies in his own studio he bought with his The Dirty Dozen (1967) money.

In 1968, it was about the only mainstream movie about lesbians. It made sense that critics in the gay press were unhappy with it, not that stodgy mainstream critics went for it. I'm not sure how it should be regarded today, but I liked it. George was an awful person and her soap opera didn't look very good. I would think becoming a voice actor would be a nice change. Take it easy for a while.

The Mouse That Roared (1959) Peter Sellers, Jean Seberg, directed by Jack Arnold

Directed by Jack Arnold who directed The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man and numerous episodes of Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch. He was well-regarded in Hollywood. I found it surprising that he worked on those TV shows, but I always like their look, beautifully directed one-camera sit-coms. 

I was a little disappointed. I imagined a more creative or surprising way in which the Grand Duchy of Fenwick would conquer the United States than stumbling upon America's football-like doomsday bomb. It was like a less realistic proto-Dr Strangelove, but they kept talking about what nice people Americans were. I've been to Canada a couple of times and felt like the biggest jerk. I don't know about other countries, but Canadians are so much nicer than us. Leaders of the Duchy thought they'd declare war on the U.S., be quickly defeated then benefit from a sort of Marshall Plan because Americans are so generous. I don't know how British audiences felt about this after the UK went through years of poverty paying their massive war debt to the United States.

With Peter Sellers playing multiple roles and Jean Seberg just one year before Breathless.  

Filmed in Britain. 

When Harry Met Sally... (1989)

It must have been December 15th. I went with my sister and her husband to a local production of Oklahoma! A friend's son was in it. We stopped and ate on the way home and somehow got on the subject of the films of Rob Reiner. I didn't care for them. I couldn't stand Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, I thought The American President was a morbid romantic fantasy about Bill Clinton dating again after Hillary dies; Spinal Tap just didn't interest me. I know he made others. 

They told me I should watch When Harry Met Sally. They were sure I'd like it.

We went home and were in the living room. I opened my laptop and looked at the news. Two people were found dead in Rob Reiner's home. The police wouldn't say who they were, but they did tell their ages which were the same as Rob Reiner and his wife. Variety was the first site I saw that stated that Rob and Michele Reiner had died.

My brother-in-law asked if I wanted to retract what I said about Reiner's movies. I didn't. It was unrelated. I sometimes separate the art from the artist. 

So, after all this time, I finally watched When Harry Met Sally..., about two terribly unlikable people who start dating. It wasn't his fault, but Billy Crystal was not romantic leading man material. 

When it came out, it was compared to the films of Woody Allen, but Woody Allen's characters generally had careers and families, parents, friends---they didn't just walk about talking and talking about how men were from Mars and women were from Venus. 

The big gag in it, where Sally makes a spectacle of herself in a crowded restaurant, didn't really make sense. No one would do that. Earlier in the movie, Harry and Sally were in another restaurant and she was humiliated when she blurted out something about her sex life attracting the attention of other diners. Maybe it showed her character arc, how much she had grown and changed.

I feel a little hurt that my sister thought I would like this thing. 

Written by Nora Ephron. Free on a streaming channel called Cineplex. 

Hothead (1963)

Frank (John Delgar) is a hothead. He's very unpleasant, a terrible jerk. He's angry about his father having abandoned him and his mother, leaving her to work her way into an early grave. Frank had to go to work himself when he was twelve. Now he lived his aunt, his father's sister. 

Frank has the day free after he's fired from his job. He drives around in his big old car. He and his friends, Tom and Iris (Robert Glenn and Barnara Joyce) spend most of the movie dressed in swimwear. They pick up a pleasant, well-dressed middle-aged hobo (Steve Talbot) and take him to the beach. He calls the kids to hang around in a beach house he just broke into. They have liquor. With Tom passed out. the hobo tries to sexually assault Iris who runs drunkenly from the house and finds Frank who's sitting on the beach losing his mind. He thinks the hobo is his father.

Frank is completely unsympathetic. He probably didn't need to be. He could have been a nice guy who came to believe a hitchhiker was his father who deserved to die. 

The movie was the only credit for the director and most of the cast. One actor, Robert Pearson, appeared in 2001 a Space Odyssey as an actor in the inflight movie. Barbara Joyce was a regular on The Ken Berry Show and appeared in a TV series, Legends of the Superheroes (1979). Robert Glenn was in The Last Picture Show and Larry Buchanan's A Bullet for Pretty Boy.

It's free on Tubi and available on DVD.  Still available after all these years. That says something for it.

Claude Chabrol's Blood Relatives (1978)

The novel by Ed McBain was set in New York but Chabrol changed the setting to Montreal. Donald Sutherland as a police detective who investigates the murder of a 17-year-old girl which was witnessed by her cousin. The Canadian police were surprisingly polite even while interrogating Donald Pleasance playing a convicted child molester. It was kind of nice for a change. 

I'll try not to give anything away, but it seemed like a coincidence that I watched this movie soon after the Florida state legislature failed to pass a bill banning marriage between first cousins. 

The victim (Lisa Langois) is an orphan taken in by her aunt and uncle. She shares a bedroom with her cousin (Aude Landry) and there's a male cousin (Laurent Malet) living there, too. 

Ed McBain aka Evan Hunter really cranked out the best sellers. So many of them were made into movies. The best was Kurosawa's High and Low.

Available on a Roku Channel called Movie Vault which may not be around long. An identical channel called Movie Hub was quickly shut down.

Timothee Chalamet vs Orson Welles

I missed the Oscars. I hadn't seen any of the movies, but it's the only time anything interesting or surprising happens on live television. I didn't know it was happening that night until I looked on the computer and saw some news item about someone or other winning an Oscar for one thing or another. 

I watched some of it on YouTube. It looked painful, Timothee Chalamet smiling a bit too broadly as Conan O'Brien mocked his unkind comments about opera and ballet. Chalamet had to show he was a good sport, but it wasn't that funny. He should have practiced in front of a mirror, looking at images of himself when he was genuinely but only slightly amused and learned to simulate that. 

He should have played it cool in the months leading up to it. 

I am reminded of the words of Orson Welles talking with Henry Jaglom about Woody Allen. Welles hated Allen and thought he was arrogant. Jaglom argues that Allen wasn't arrogant, just shy. Weird that Welles would mistake one for the other, but he explained:

“He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anyone who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself but he loves himself. A very tense situation to people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest.” [emphasis added]

Orson Welles had the good sense to pretend to be modest. 

Instead of saying he wanted to be one of "the greats", Chalamet could have said he was trying to improve. Instead of saying he'd been doing "top level shit", he could have said "I've been trying my darndest."

Timothee's a millionaire. His career could grind to a halt and he'd still be fine. 

The Flying Deuces (1939) Laurel & Hardy

Laurel & Hardy are apparently on vacation in Paris. Ollie is terribly upset when a Parisian waitress rejects him for another man. He decides to tie himself to a large rock and throw himself into the Seine and he insists that Stan joins him in death. A French Army officer stops them and suggests they join the Foreign Legion---he'll forget his heartbreak in no time. They do and are soon sentenced to death by firing squad.

Laurel & Hardy made most of their movies for Hal Roach, but this was produced by RKO. The director and Stan Laurel reportedly hated each other and Laurel said the movie taught him to never work with writers who weren't familiar with their movies. I haven't seen their other feature films so I'm not familiar with their work, either. I found them a little annoying. 

Free on Tubi.

The End (1978) Burt Reynolds

I took a class in high school called "Death & Dying". I don't know what year it was, but VCR's were just beginning to take over and we were going to finish the class by watching a movie about death. I think the teacher wanted to get Woody Allen's Love & Death but it was out, so he got The End. We had to get permission slips signed to see an R rated movie. I was eighteen and got to sign my own.

Directed by and starring Burt Reynolds as a shady real estate dealer diagnosed with an incurable blood disease. He has three months to a year to live. His doctor (Norman Fell) tells him his death will be painful so he immediately sets out to kill himself. After seeing his elderly parents (Myrna Loy and Pat O'Brien) and raiding their medicine cabinet, he wakes up in a mental hospital where fellow patient Dom DeLuise, having already killed his father, agrees to help Reynolds end his life.

With Sally Field, Carl Reiner, Kristy McNichol, Joanne Woodward, Robby Benson, and Strother Martin among others. 

It picked up halfway through when Dom DeLuise appears. Much of the humor goes back and forth between Burt Reynolds' overwrought reaction to his diagnosis and people trying to cheer him up. 

When girlfriend Sally Field tells him that she feels that something she did caused his illness, he said, "You don't give someone a blood disease. That's a gift from God," which is pretty mild movie blasphemy. Might give you the feel for this. It's not a realistic dramedy. Becomes slightly serious when he talks to his daughter and imagines her reaction to his death but that doesn't last long.

Burt Reynolds drives a lovely Jaguar XKE (E Type) convertible. 

The teacher could have rented almost anything. Most movies are about death. We could have watched a war movie, a Bruce Lee movie, James Bond, especially On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The Third Man. Almost anything with a dog. I would say The Seventh Seal but it was in a classroom and you'd have to read subtitles from across the room.

Free on Tubi and Pluto. 

The Naked Jungle (1954)

Eleanor Parker travels into the jungles of South America in 1901, married by proxy to belligerent 30ish Charlston Heston. Wealthy but isolated, Heston is enraged to learn that his wife had been married before, a widow and not a virgin. This was important to him because, he makes it clear, he was an incel and had never known the touch of a woman. 

"I told you, I was 19 when I came out here," he says. "Before that, I had no time for women. Afterwards... in the jungle they have a name for the man who goes into the native villages at night. No one calls me by that name. You said I didn't know anything about women. You were right, madam. I know nothing about women. Nothing at all."

I'm a little surprised this was in a movie in 1954.  He's in no hurry to consummate their marriage.  

I might have been nine or ten when saw this on TV. My attention span being what it was, I couldn't have paid attention to the weird sex drama that drags on for a full hour. Only the last 30 minutes interested me with the millions of man-eating army ants devouring everything in their path. 

"You've both gone mad!" William Conrad says when the couple decides to stay and battle the ants. "You're up against a monster twenty miles long and two miles wide! Forty square miles of agonizing death! You can't stop it!"

The ant stuff was only half an hour and it still seemed slow. 

Technicolor. Most of it filmed in a studio, much of it in front of rear screen projections. 

They didn't treat the Indians well at all.

Free on Movie Hub and Prime video. $3.99 on Apple TV, and Fandango at Home. 

One Man Jury (1978)

Not much to say. Quite bad. Jack Palance as tough L.A. detective who botches every arrest by violating everyone's rights so his cases keep getting thrown out. He becomes so infuriated, he murders a guy. That took almost an hour. Then the Mafia murders a few people. They strangle a weirdly helpless boxer. 

It was an ugly time. Bad clothes, big stupid-looking cars. Palance drives a Ford Granada.

With Chris Mitchum, Robert Mitchum's son. 

Palance's fellow Ukrainian Mike Mazurki has one scene.

Movieland.tv seems to be back, but now it's called Movie Hub. No telling how long it will last. There were a couple glitches which made it clear the movie was from a VHS tape.

Someone else's "Melania" review

The guy on the right in the picture above is director Brett Ratner who fled to Israel after being accused of several sexual assaults during the #MeToo era. He hadn't worked in years before directing the "documentary" Melania.

Jeffrey St Clair on Counterpunch.com:

Here’s my review of “Melania”, written, like Norman Mailer’s infamous review of Waiting for Godot, without having seen it: Melania Trump is one of the world’s most boring people. There’s nothing the least interesting about her. She’s not even evil enough to waste time condemning. Her fleshy photo shoots lack the faintest hint of eroticism. Even the great Helmut Newton would have failed to coax any intimation of suggestiveness or carnality out of her stiff posture and bland, expressionless visage. Her entire adult life, she seems to have willingly played the role of a walking mannequin. Which made her the perfect match for Trump, of course, who views wives, like he views everything else, as acquisitions, objects for display. But is that the real her? Only her mani-pedicurist knows for sure. The lone memorable thing she’s ever done is wear that Zara jacket with the faux graffiti reading, “I Really Don’t Care, Do You?” when she was forced to a migrant children’s detention “camp” in Texas. Now, that was a little punk, a little spark of rebellion. But then she almost immediately reverted to her drone-like essence, which she has scrupulously maintained ever since.

In Cold Blood (1967)

Based on the book by Truman Capote about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcolmb, Kansas, in 1959 by Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson) and Perry Smith (Robert Blake).

Capote's "nonfiction novel" was full of deep background, especially about Perry Smith, the childhood abuse he suffered at the hands of his father and the nuns running an orphanage his father placed him in. 

I hadn't seen the movie in years and I had forgotten there was so much exposition. In the first few minutes we learn that Smith hates nuns (for pretty good reason), fantasizes about being a singer, had his legs injured in a motorcycle accident and has a childish belief in his ability to find buried treasure with the help of treasure maps he got somewhere. At one point, he mentions The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a movie Blake appeared in as a child.

All Dick Hickock had was a head injury from a car accident which changed his face and his personality and I guess was partly responsible for the extent of his criminality.

One of the things that stood out to me was Dick Hickock signing a letter to Perry Smith "Love, Dick", and calling him "honey" which still seems odd to me.

There were two more recent movies, Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006), which covered much the same ground, focusing on Capote researching and writing the book and his relationship with the murderers. 

I read the book when I was in high school. At the time, I had more sympathy, at least for Perry Smith. The book gave me an antipathy for nuns. My mother, I later learned, knew a guy in high school in the 1940's, who was prone to fits of rage. He had been abused by nuns in an orphanage. Among other things, the Brides of Christ would hold his head underwater. 

Stars Robert Blake, Scott Wilson and John Forsythe. With Will Geer (TV's Grandpa Walton) as the prosecutor. Teddy Eccles as the child hitchhiker and '30's B western star Raymond Hatton as his grandfather. 

Directed by Richard Brooks.

Filmed in the Clutter family home just eight years after they were murdered there.

My Side of the Mountain (1969)

You know the kid who was hitchhiking with his grandfather and got picked up by mass murderers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in In Cold Blood (1967)? The same kid stars in this movie about a child who runs away from home to live alone in the woods. My teacher read the novel to the class when I was in the fourth grade. I guess there was some suspense where he does some rock climbing alone so the slightest fall could mean slow agonizing death. Human life was dirt cheap in those days and schools thought nothing of encouraging that sort of thing. 

Nature is horrible, just horrible. He was safer in In Cold Blood climbing into the car with the murderers. In this movie, the kid is befriended by two wildly irresponsible adults who know he's living out there alone but don't call the police.

But it's stupid to be bothered by the unwise actions of a fictional Canadian child. I doubt any kids did things like this because they watched the movie or had the book forcibly read to them. There were, however, two morons who found In Cold Blood inspirational, so they murdered a couple who were walking on the beach in Oregon.

The little fellow in this movie, Ted Eccles, had a long list of credits. Just a year later, he played a victim of Ma Barker's gang in Bloody Mama. He went on to work as a director and executive producer and to work in movie advertising. 

With Theodore Bickel, Tudi Wiggins, and Paul Hebert.