Robert Altman's Kansas City (1996)

  Robert Altman’s Kansas City (1996) is effectively a twin of his Nashville (1975). Both use their titular cities to anatomize their respective music and political cultures. Both respond pointedly to their time.

In Nashville the Country and Music scene catches the tension between America’s traditional political values — ostensibly democratic — and the confrontational spirit that grew out of the new individualism, personal and sexual liberty and protests against the Vietnam War. Michael Murphy plays a political go-between (aka hack) who dangles support for a governorship to win an influential musician’s (Henry Gibson) presidential support. The only Black character represents Charlie Pride, the first African American success in American country. Our guide through the narrative is the callow Shelley Duvall flower child, rootless, passive and gormless. 

In Kansas City there is a greater weight on the city’s blues/jazz tradition, with correspondingly more attention to the tension between the white and black societies. Against the contemporary setting of Nashville, Kansas City revives the 1930s, recalling the roots of America’s urban racial division.

As our guide through the plot Blondie O’Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is Duvall’s antithesis: a fevered, complex, impulsive, violent woman who stoops to kidnapping in hope of recovering her husband Johnny (Dermot Mulroney) from the clutches of the Black criminal gang headed by Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte). Blondie is one of those "crazy little women" promised in the Leiber-Stoller ode to the city.  

Michael Murphy is again Altman’s slick politician (as in his Tanner series, as well). His Henry Stilton is a big cheese in his state because he’s an official advisor to President Roosevelt. Blondie  kidnaps his wife Carolyn (Miranda Richardson) to compel Stilton to rescue her Johnny. The ostensibly legitimate White authority enlists the governor’s deployment of thugs to intervene — too late.

Nothing of Blondie’s passion for her Johnny appears in the Stiltons. Despite the white couple’s erotic pet names — Heinie and Pussy — there is no ardor between them. Stilton does what he has to in order to save his wife — and prevent a scandal — but he declines to speak to her.

Indeed the White world is defined by this government’s — shall we say? — pragmatism.  Steve Buscemi, as Blondie’s sister’s husband (also, because these characters live in ruts, a Johnny), embodies the criminal abuse of democracy with his deployment of imported and multiple voters and his violence toward the uncooperative. However more stylish, there is also a telling bigotry in the ostensibly well-meaning but offensively condescending, naive, supercilious, colonialism that Carolyn bestows upon the black women in her continuous drugged stupor. 

Blondie’s loser husband is a parody of the White understanding the Black. He dons blackface to steal the money-belt of a black high-roller. In a twist on sexual stereotyping, victim Sheepshan is a huge, expansive Black enriched by his contract to plant telephone poles! Caught and facing death, Johnny preserves his dignity by facing up to Seldom Seen. To save his life he offers to become Seldom’s slave, a historic reversal that appeals to Seldom’s humour. “You have guts,” Seldom smiles, respectfully. “Now they’re your guts,” vows Johnny. So Seldom carves them out.    

The Black leader’s very name asserts the film’s rare presentation of a Black voice, perspective and moral structure. Such authority is indeed seldom seen. And even more rarely heard. As the gang leader, Belafonte is brilliant, a total opposite to his usual mellow voice and gentleness. Here he rasps his orders and his own firm and self-respecting principles. As he explains his commitment to Johnny’s theft victim: “You have to understand Sheepshan. He's a loser. And losers've got to be respected. They're the backbone of my business. They're my customers, and I take good care of my customers.” Such respect and responsibility are seldom seen in the film’s white community. Despite having Blondie carried kicking and screaming from his club, Seldom respects at least one woman’s authority: “If my mother was alive, she'd cut your balls off. Woman went right to the point. She never, ever missed a beat.” (Further to his — and Altman’s —credit, Belafonte wrote his own dialogue.)

The film’s moral center may arguably lie in the frequent and extensive musical scenes at The Hey Hey Club. Without the explicitness of the Nashville lyrics, the jazz scenes provide the film’s most powerful emotional address and affirmation of the Black spirit — and especially the harmony that lies in freeing the individual voice. To this end there are two extended scenes of dual jazz lead performers. 

The first is postered as a “Battle” between two star soloists, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins. Their duel in alternating solos, of increasing inventiveness and strength, concludes with a handshake of mutual regard. There is a harmony even in this energetic rivalry. The film closes on another rich but gentler number that foregrounds two bassists — instrumentalists who are more commonly supports in the background.

All the musical numbers expressing the Black world emphasize harmony and the freeing of the individual voice. That integrity contrasts to the false hegemony and effects of  America’s racist power structure in 1996 as in 1935 — and, alas, even more so in 2023.