By Signal Staff
A film noir tale of a bank caper gone awry with betrayal comes to Buzz Classic Movies this week with a Saturday night showing of “Kansas City Confidential.”
The 1952 film has earned a 79% “fresh” rating from the critics based on 14 reviews, and a 75% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes’ “Popcornmeter” based on more than 500 ratings.
“A mysterious fellow (Preston Foster) contacts a trio of criminals (Jack Elam, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef) to help with a bank heist,” says the Rotten Tomatoes summary of the movie. “The four wear masks and remain strangers to each other, planning to reunite in Mexico to divvy up the loot. Joe Rolfe (John Payne), the man they framed to take the heat, gets his charges dropped, and the police offer him a reward if he can help recover the cash. He agrees, and when one of the thieves meets his end, Rolfe assumes his identity to catch the crooks.”
Critic Sean Howe wrote for Slant Magazine: “Falls into that rarefied early-’50s cycle of noir, which benefited from B directors who had learned how to quickly dispense with the genre conventions and deliver brutal action and lurid innuendos.”