Kansas City Confidential (1952)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is an astonishing documentary that will wring your heart while it bends your mind

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Someone else called this an enjoyable noir, which it is. But the same reviewer also said it was little-known. Though I think by this point, KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL has become increasingly more well-known because the genre's fans are elevating this particular title to some sort of cult status. And it deserves that extra recognition.This was the first collaboration between director Phil Karlson and leading man John Payne. Payne plays a down-on-his-luck ex-con who becomes implicated in a heist that is masterminded by Preston Foster and involves Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand. The gritty drama takes several exciting twists and turns, and viewers get drawn into the predicament faced by Payne's protagonist. Though the action begins in Kansas City, it eventually moves to Borados, Mexico, as our guy tries to clear himself and unmask the culprits. Karlson shot the exterior scenes set in Mexico on Catalina Island. The film is bolstered by the presence of Coleen Gray as Payne's love interest, a young woman determined to help him.

This initially started out as a great movie. A basic bank-robbery/frame-up plot is punctuated with a bit of intrigue, as the robbers are anonymous to each other due to some creepy masks.Our hero's sense of desperation is fairly- accurately relayed throughout his beatings at the hands of the cops, loss of employment, and search for justice in Tijuana. The death scenes are pulled off fairly well, despite the complete lack of blood. (I get it: WWII just ended and soldiers didn't want to see any more carnage. However, it isn't as difficult to change a camera angle as it is to completely suspend one's sense of disbelief.)The movie starts to unravel as soon as our protagonist's love interest comes into the picture. Her acting ability is sub-par, and her dialog does little to endear her to the viewer. In fact, the suspense the film has produced up to this point is completely destroyed... and all for a poorly-interwoven romantic sub-plot. The gritty atmosphere is abandoned for a mediocre romantic angle that goes nowhere - and our hero's belle is nowhere near likable enough to develop the sub-plot to any degree worthy of the digression.As such, whereas I would have given the movie 8/10, it is reduced to 5/10.

A down-on-his-luck ex-GI.He finds himself framed for an armored car robbery.When he's finally released for lack of evidence--after having been beaten up and tortured by the police--he sets out to discover who set him up, and why. The trail leads him into Mexico and a web of hired killers and corrupt cops.Lots of recognizable character actors. The action is tight as a 22 year old and the story equally compelling.Well done, although the the available prints lack quality.

Everything's up to date in Kansas City, so a group of bank robbers in hooded masks get together to commit the biggest heist that the mid-west city (spread across two states) will ever see. Three of the robbers have no idea what the others look like, with only the mastermind aware of who is who, having basically blackmailed the others to get involved with promise of a large cut. They don't count on ex-con John Payne, a war hero and reformed felon, being arrested for an alleged involvement, only because he was near the scene of the crime in the same flower shop van that the others used as a get-away vehicle. After less than half an hour, the action switches to foreign locations where Payne begins his investigation as to how he got framed so he can clear this off of his record. After one of the men is killed, Payne assumes his identity, and tracks down the other men, including the mastermind (Preston Foster) and his beautiful daughter (Colleen Gray), where he is forced into the final showdown with investigators of the crime and a surprise is revealed that will alter the outcome of the original robbery.The performances of the four actual criminals are worth viewing for individual detailed characteristics, and Payne, a truly versatile actor, gives a nice dead-pan performance as he expresses an understandable world weariness, first from surviving a war, then from trying to turn his life around from crime. Gray plays more than just a walk-on love interest with no real purpose. Even if her screen time is limited, she brings a different dimension into the character of her father mastermind. Foster is outstanding, first in plotting the crime, then in bewilderment as he meets the intrusive Payne, and finally, as he faces his own conscience. Jack Elam, Neville Brand and Lee Van Cleef are worthy of note as the three men involved, while Don Orlando, in a brief role of a cab driver that Payne meets in Tijuana, is memorable as well. This well written film noir is another example of expressing the true meaning of "Crime Does Not Pay" and that in the end, the truth is always revealed.