Kansas City Confidential (1952) is obectively a great movie, but for me, what really sells it is the three thugs hired by a master criminal to pull of a $1.2 Million bank job.
The master criminal has been observing the bank, noting that a flower delivery truck pulls up to the shop next to the bank every day at the same time--just before an armored car transporting cash shows up at the bank. That truck is driven by Joe Rolfe, a WWII combat veteran who screwed up once and did some time in jail, but is now working a legit job as he studies engineering.
But when the robbery goes down--using a duplicate of his delivery truck that appears moments after he leaves the scene--Joe is hauled in by the cops. Because of his record, the police are pretty certain he's guilty. So certain, in fact, that they keep working him over to force him to confess. Eventually, they find the duplicate truck and are forced to let him go, but he's lost his job and his face had already been plastered all over the newspapers as a suspect. His life is effectively ruined.
But before we get to this point, we watch the head crook recruit the three men he'll need to pull off the bank job. This is where we see some of the most perfectly cast character actors in the history of cinema. The three thugs are played by Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand. They are, collectively, the most thug-like (thugiest?) thugs ever.
Their boss recruits them individually, wearing a mask so that they don't know who he is. They wear masks on the job as well, so they also don't know each other. None of them can rat out the others if caught after the boss gives them enough money to leave the country and live comfortably for awhile until its safe to split the bank money.
I love the recruiting scenes, by the way. As the boss meets each of the thugs, we learn a little about each one. All of them have records and are either currently wanted for something or on the verge of being as three-time loser. Each is obviously a brutal and amoral creep, but each has his own personality. Pete Harris (Elam) is a compulsive gambler and cowardly. Tony Romano (Van Cleef) is a womanizer who probably isn't as attractive to women as he thinks he is. Boyd Kane (Brand) is gum-chewing brute who killed a cop on his last job.
Though each of these actors is talented and each played a variety of roles during their long careers--good guys as well as bad guys. Elam, in particular, was often hilarious in comedic roles. But when any of them played bad guys, they would literally reek of evil. Put the three of them together and you really do have the "thuggiest" thugs ever.
The bulk of the movie followed Joe Rolfe as he tries to find the bank robbers and clear his own name. A friend whose life he saved on Iwo Jima knows a guy who knows a guy and puts him on the trail of Pete Harris, who is hiding out in Tijuana. I love that he's told that Harris has "weird eyes" and likes to play craps as his starting clues. When discussing a character played by Jack Elam, "weird eyes" is pretty much all the information you need.
Harris ends up dead and Rolfe ends up in a small Mexican fishing village with the other two thugs, having taken on Harris' identify with hopes of catching the head crook. But things go wry and he ends up playing a cat-and-mouse game in which he very well might get eaten.
In the meantime, we learn that the head crook has a background and an endgame that will change the situation drastically. If you haven't seen the film, I won't give away this very effective plot twist, but allow you the fun of discovering it for yourself.
Kansas City Confidential is classic Film Noir, with a strong plot full of suspense, great characters and atmospheric black-and-white photography. And the presense of Elam, Brand and Van Cleef in roles they each play to perfection makes it even better.
A channel called Film Detective has a high-quality print available on YouTube:
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