Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Frank Barhydt and Robert Altman
Starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Belafonte, Michael Murphy and Steve Buscemi
USA, 1996
Our last stop on the Harry Belafonte tour, KANSAS CITY is an ensemble piece by cinematic legend Robert Altman that explores the criminal underworld of Kansas City in 1934, mixing politics, organized crime and street level crooks in a couple of kidnapping plots that ultimately don’t really go anywhere, but as usual, with Altman, forward momentum isn’t really the point. It’s more about the atmosphere.
For this reason, and others I won’t get into here, Altman has always been one of the “greats” that is harder for me to get into. I don’t know why, exactly, but everyone has someone they just sort of don’t get, and Altman is almost that for me – I’ve seen and enjoyed many of his movies, probably more than I disliked, so I guess I might be protesting too much. There’s just something that keeps me at a little more arm’s length than some other highly revered auteurs.
All that said, the best part of this movie is how Altman dwells on the jazz scene of 1930s Kansas City, cutting away from the action repeatedly to showcase a great ensemble of jazz musicians in uninterrupted performances. The movie’s worth watching for that alone. I’m assuming, the way movies work, there’s probably a ton of this performance footage that didn’t make it into the movie, and it’d be interesting to see an alternate cut of KANSAS CITY that does away with the plot and just focuses on the jazz performances. In any case, after seeing this movie, you’ll want the soundtrack.
Harry Belafonte is a small but memorable part of an ensemble that includes the likes of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Steve Buscemi. He plays a gangster named Seldom Seen who runs the jazz club where the great performances take place, and conducts his criminal empire with an extra special bit of spite against racial injustice in America. The bulk of his slice of the story involves a small time crook who not only rips him off (Dermot Mulroney), but disguises himself in black face to do it, in an attempt to put the police on the trail of a Black guy instead of a white guy. So this is doubly insulting to Belafonte, who strings Mulroney along in a series of suspenseful monologues where you know violence is just around the corner. This is a more real and threatening version of the cartoonish gangster Belafonte plays in UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT, and the two performers show both extremes of what he’s capable of.
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