![]() Whatever the reasons for his transformation, he was very effective both as a smiling song-and-dance man in love with the All-American girl as well as in the hard bitten roles he later took on. He was very smart about the film business as a business (and shrewdly cleaned up a packet in Hollywood due to wise investments) and may therefore have grasped that the war shifted filmgoers’ taste toward darker movies that would begin to supplant sunnier fare. But a few years after the war he changed into a tough actor with great physical presence and a clipped style of delivering dialogue. ![]() He was originally an upbeat singer and dancer in light-hearted films and was also of course a star of the heartwarming Miracle on 34th Street. John Payne’s career is almost a noir story in itself. The film’s viewpoint is bleak: The cops are not much better than the criminals, to extent that they are even different people at all. George Diskant’s camerawork, particularly in the first half, is striking, with effective use of close-ups and lighting to let the actors act and the dark mood to suffuse the audience. All the performances are very good, particularly Jack Elam as a twitchy, chain-smoking criminal, Preston Foster as an embittered ex-cop with both a brutal and a soft side, and Payne as a cynical tough guy out for some sort of redemption. The script has some satisfying twists and moments of delicious tension. This film is proof-positive that you don’t need much money to make a solid, entertaining film, and the complete lack of pretension to anything else is one of Kansas City Confidential’s charms. He escapes their clutches and decides to pursue the gang, though whether he wants them brought to justice or just desires a piece of the pie is not immediately clear. Meanwhile, an ex-con, ex-GI (Payne, playing two noir archetypes in one!) who was at the wrong place at the wrong time gets pinched by the police. The mastermind instructs them to hide out until the money is laundered, and gives them a secret method of identifying each other when the time is ripe for the payout. All of them wear masks and thus are unknown both to the police and to each other. A masked criminal mastermind half-recruits, half-bullies three lowlifes into pulling off an armed robbery. The post-war period saw many movies merge elements of film noir with the traditions of the gangster melodrama, including the first collaboration of these three men: 1952’s Kansas City Confidential.Īt one level, this is a superb heist film (which allegedly influenced Quentin Tarantino’s conception of Reservoir Dogs). In the years after the war, actor John Payne, director Phil Karlson, and producer Edward Small collaborated in various configurations, yielding a solid run of modestly-budgeted, high quality films.
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