- Phil Karlson's Kansas City Confidential is a film that gets exponentially more interesting with every surprise it reveals. Initially, it telegraphs itself as a standard heist film, with an anonymous, masked mastermind recruiting criminals Pete Harris (Jack Elam), Tony Romano (Lee Van Cleef), and Boyd Kane (Neville Brand) for a bank job. His big idea, familiar to fans of The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three or Reservoir Dogs, is that the three crooks should wear masks and learn as little about one another as possible to minimize the chances that any one of them will spoil the operation. Sure enough, the heist is successful, and a set of false leads causes the cops to question an innocent florist named Joe Rolfe (John Payne) instead of pursuing the real robbers.
- The film's first surprise is that Rolfe turns out to be its main protagonist. Upon being released from prison, the florist discovers that having his mugshot pasted all over the evening edition hasn't exactly helped his business, so he sets off to find the real criminals. After some sleuthing, he is able to locate the gun-happy dice roller Harris at a gambling joint in Tijuana. Although he has to hold Harris at gunpoint to have a conversation, Rolfe claims that he just wants his cut of the money to make up for the inconvenience of being framed. That's the second surprise, regardless of whether Rolfe is telling the truth. The third is that Harris gets himself gunned down at the Tijuana airport before he can meet up with the rest of the crew to get his cut. It doesn't take Rolfe long to realize that he'll have a better chance with the remaining crooks by posing as Harris himself.
- Upon arriving in the Mexican resort town of Barados, Rolfe quickly spots the other two robbers. It turns out Romano has been passing the time playing cards with an old fisherman named Foster (Preston Foster) and hitting on the encouraging souvenir girl (Dona Drake), while Kane has been playing pool and glowering. More surprises: Foster used to be a policeman, and his daughter Helen (Coleen Gray) is a lawyer. Not exactly the company you would want around for splitting up the take from a bank heist, but maybe they're exactly the help that Rolfe needs. Another surprise arrives when Kane reveals that he knew Harris in prison and that he didn't look anything like Rolfe. Just when you think you know what's coming next, the final surprise reveals that Foster hails from Kansas City, too.
- Although this ready supply of surprises does plenty to elevate the plot of Kansas City Confidential above that of the typical film noir, I was equally impressed with how well this film uses its character actors. The trio of gangsters played perfectly by Elam, Van Cleef, and Brand are an unapologetically ugly bunch indeed, rendered even more unappealing by the streams of sweat constantly running down their faces. I'm just guessing that the movie couldn't afford more than a few stock shots of a Mexican-looking resort town (just as it contains one single arial shot of Kansas City), but the sweat goes a long way toward reminding us that we're supposed to be south of the border. As for the rest of the film, I can honestly say that I never thought the tale of a vengeful florist could be so compelling. Certainly I didn't see the various surprises coming, and by the end I wanted to watch again from the beginning knowing how it would all turn out. That's the sign of a good film noir.
