Thoughts on Kansas City

Kansas City (1996) directed by Robert Altman. This felt like Altman, in tribute to his childhood of 1930s Kansas City, wanted to make both a gangster film and a musical, and tried blending it together. It did feel disjointed at times, where Altman clearly seemed more in love with the long free-flowing jazz scenes than the gangster plots, which felt more average to me, save for the performance of Harry Belafonte playing against type as a crime boss/club owner named Seldom Seen, coming off as both charming and menacing.

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a Jean Harlow-wannabe gun moll named Blondie whose loser husband Dermot Mulroney crossed Belafonte’s gang and is being held prisoner, so she abducts Miranda Richardson’s opium-addicted society wife Carolyn to blackmail her campaigning politician husband to get the crime family to release Mulroney in exchange for Richardson. The plot is a long winded mix of political corruption, gangsters, racism (CW: white characters drop racial slurs a lot in this movie), and Depression-era struggles. One of the subplots that interested me more was for a pregnant 14-year old Black girl from Joplin who came to KC to have her baby, and is being guided by a teenage Charlie Parker(Albert J. Burnes). She is largely outside of the main plots, and is like the audience perspective in entering this messed-up world, and largely stays out of their corrupt business.

The movie felt like it jumped around a lot, trying to be loose like jazz music, but also felt like it was all over the place, and more into the fun of its period setting than the story as a whole. I liked the music scenes a lot, and though I usually like Leigh, her “gun moll” voice felt very self-conscious and put-on, like an exaggeration of 1930s Pre-Code heroines, which her character clearly models herself after. I did like how Richardson’s character comes off as a vapid society wife lost in her mind on laudanum, but can be subtly funny, and had this weird dazed vibe to her that I liked, it stood out as more interesting to me.

So I thought this was fine, with good music and some standout performances spread around, but not really great as a whole. But this jazz battle scene is pretty awesome, so I’ll share it here.