Like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the gangster film Kansas City shows how Robert Altman had a subversive streak. Sure, this film includes scenery-chewing crooks and complex betrayals, but there is a strange affability that shows Altman does not want to take the genre as seriously as his contemporaries. In fact, parts of Kansas City work as an anti-gangster film, as Altman has little interest in the squabbles between criminals, who he sees as as small-minded and unworthy of the period in which they thrived. Unlike The Godfather, there is no nostalgia here, and, in his own sneaky way, Altman is more critical of the lifestyle than Martin Scorsese.
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Blondie, a woman in 1934 Kansas City with a desperate kidnapping plan. She takes a politician’s wife named Carolyn (Miranda Richardson) as her hostage, and uses her to bargain for the safe return of her husband, Johnny (Dermot Mulroney), a two-bit hoodlum. Johnny got in trouble when he robbed Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte, playing against type), a genuinely dangerous gangster who caught Johnny without all that much effort. The specifics of Blondie’s plan are convoluted — making things trickier, Carolyn’s husband, Henry (Michael Murphy), is away on business, and cannot reach the powerful men who could ensure Johnny’s safety. This gives Blondie and Carolyn time to talk, with a kind of bond forming between them as they share their frustrations over the male-driven world in which they are stuck. They even have time to go to the movies, a Jean Harlow flick, which leads us to understand that Blondie clearly wants to emulate Harlow’s “bad girl” persona.
Notable exceptions like Secret Honor notwithstanding, Altman is rarely content to explore just a few characters and stories. Kansas City has a broader canvas than the story of Blondie and her hostage. A local election is underway, and yet another character named Johnny (Steve Buscemi) commits widespread electoral fraud to get the result he wants (or is paid to want). The phrase “vote early and vote often” does not begin to cover it, since this Johnny hires deadbeats and drunks to stuff ballots and intimidate anyone who goes against his rival. But the most important subplot, one where Altman plants the film’s soul, has nothing to do with crime or corruption. Kansas City is also a musical, and there are frequent scenes at the Hey Hey Club, where contemporary 1990s jazz musicians portray Kansas City legends like Count Basie or Lester Young.
Robert Altman was born in Kansas City, and he was 9 years old when the events of this film take place. In other words, he was not old enough to fully understand the milieu, but he does have a strong sense of what mattered from that period. Altman is not shy about his contempt, not just for crime and corruption, but for the kind of stories that get told about criminals or politicians. The only character for whom he seems to have any curiosity or patience is Seldom Seen, a gangster by necessity whose true interests lie elsewhere. As if to underscore the point, there is a scene of coldhearted brutality in which Seldom Seen oversees a murder while telling a joke. The killing happens in the background, a marked difference from the typical crime film, because the only perpetrator worth a damn hates a lot of his daily business. But he does run the jazz club.
Indifference to crime – and the frankly brutal violence in the film – puts Kansas City into another conversation about film history. The mid-1990s was a period where Quentin Tarantino, Scorsese, and the Coen Brothers led a resurgence of American crime films. The phrase “Tarantino knock-off” gets thrown around a lot, although it’s useful here because clearly Kansas City is bored by the trope. Altman seems largely uninterested in Blondie’s story. Instead, his camera drifts away from his characters and keeps finding its way to the jazz club where – in Altman’s eyes – something important is actually happening: the formation of a new American culture.
No one remembers who won elections like the one in which Johnny cheated his way to victory. No one remembers people like Blondie, a would-be kidnapper who is double-crossed in a way that was obvious to everyone but her. They are not even footnotes to history but parts of petty melodramas that are always present in any era — and always ephemeral. Altman, in his return to the jazz club and his fondness for the music, shows us what really matters. In many films, emerging forms of expression are relegated to the background, a kind of way to add credibility to a period film. Kansas City argues that that point of view is a mistake, since this music – and culture, more generally – are what will withstand the test of time. Critics and audiences were indifferent to this film, perhaps because they found it elliptical and aimless. But that quality is kind of the point, and Altman created an anti-crime film that does more than moralize. It provides an alternative to the kind of stories we usually celebrate.
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