Here’s a film about a perfectly planned heist, so perfect that it hasn’t made it into the city records, Kansas City Confidential announces as it opens, in one of those scrolling on-screen scene-setters that really should be read in an authoritative voice (but isn’t). And then, in the first of many flat illogicalities, the movie turns out to be about a heist that isn’t perfect at all. It goes wrong. Not at first, or not at first by very much. But go wrong it does.
The film can take it. On its release in 1952 it was so successful that it spawned a string of other “Confidential” movies. New York. Chicago. Hong Kong. Decades down the line it would inspire Quentin Tarantino to write Reservoir Dogs.
Which brings us to the plot. Not a group of men who know each other only by code names (Tarantino’s Mr Pink etc) but a trio of hoodlums recruited separately by a masked ringleader, who insists they all wear a mask to carry out a meticulously planned bank job, and must keep wearing those masks even when the job’s done and they’re running for the border. If no one knows who anyone else is, they won’t be able to squeal to the cops, is the idea. The second half of the ringleader’s plan is to wait till the heat has cooled down, at which point he’ll summon everyone to Mexico for the split, where each man will identify himself by presenting one half of a torn playing card, the other half of which Mr Big has himself. The guarantee that Mr Big won’t run off with all the loot for himself? Not explained. The obvious fact that Mr Big already knows who each of the men is so doesn’t need the elaborate playing-card identification system? Probably best ignore that too.
In the first of many twists, Mr Big is an ex cop whose bank-heist plan is only part of a bigger plan, which only he is privy to. In the second, an innocent bystander at the heisted bank who looks like he’s going to take the rap for the crime turns out to be an ex-con with a highly developed sense of grievance. Charged up, Joe Rolfe (John Payne) takes it upon himself to become an unofficial freelance detective and find the men who nearly got him a 20-year stretch. In the screenplay’s most implausible twist, one of the heisters dies en route to the Mexico rendezvous, allowing Joe to take his place.
There’s more, much more, and a lot of it doesn’t quite add up when it’s subjected to a moment’s scrutiny, and yet the film runs along the rails smoothly enough, the big idea being that no one in this motley assemblage gathering in Mexico knows the whole story. That’s our privilege.
It’s well cast and well played. Payne is a cool dude suited to playing an agent of justice. Preston Foster makes for an avuncular Mr Big, just right for an ex-cop who thinks he knows it all but maybe doesn’t. As the three heist recruitees – Neville Brand, Jack Elam and Lee Van Cleef – all are excellent as smalltime chisellers whose hot tempers mean that, in all honesty, they’re temperamentally unsuited to a life of crime. And there’s Coleen Gray as Helen, a potential love interest for Joe, complicated by two further twists – she’s Mr Big’s daughter and she’s a trainee lawyer.
While the plot is ducking this way and that, director Phil Karlson injects frequent bouts of violence – punches are thrown that look like they hurt (Payne broke some of Elam’s ribs in their big fight scene, apparently) and regularly gets up close in people’s faces, the better to record the sweat rolling down them. The DP is George Diskant, who lit a lot of good noirs – They Live by Night, On Dangerous Ground – before moving on to TV. Just the man you need to get big-budget looks from a movie with a low spend.
It’s the journey, not the destination that’s important in Kansas City Confidential. Even as it fades to black at the end you’ll most likely still be thinking “hang on a minute, that makes no sense at all”. But then the best noirs often are like that.
Kansas City Confidential – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
