Kansas City Confidential (1952)
An ex-convict working as a flower deliveryman is arrested and beaten by police after an armored-car robbery is pulled off using a duplicate of his van. Cleared but embittered, he traces the masked gang to a Mexican resort town and works his way into the payoff, turning the hijackers against one another while falling for the mastermind's daughter.
Directed by Phil Karlson at his hardest-hitting, Kansas City Confidential pairs a genuinely vicious streak with a masked-crew heist structure that Quentin Tarantino has cited as an influence on Reservoir Dogs. Its lapsed copyright has made it one of the most widely circulated of all film noir titles.
Background
Kansas City Confidential follows an ex-convict working as a flower deliveryman who is wrongly arrested and beaten by police after an armored-car robbery is carried out using a duplicate of his delivery van. Cleared of the crime but embittered by his treatment, he tracks the masked gang responsible to a Mexican resort town and works his way into their confidence, eventually turning the hijackers against one another. Director Phil Karlson was known for bringing an unusually hard-edged, violent tone to his crime films compared to many of his contemporaries.
What to watch for
Watch for the masked-crew heist structure, in which the robbers do not know each other’s identities even as they carry out the crime together, an arrangement that director Quentin Tarantino has cited as an influence on his own film Reservoir Dogs decades later. Its lapsed copyright has made Kansas City Confidential one of the most widely circulated and frequently screened of all film noir titles, giving it an afterlife well beyond its modest original release.
