Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
Kansas City Confidential
Four masked men, mutual strangers by design, and a fall guy who won't fall.
The heist film's load-bearing wall: the masked-crew structure that Kubrick studied and Tarantino lifted outright arrives here first, in a lean Phil Karlson picture with a genuinely mean streak. An ex-con is framed by geometry rather than malice and goes to Mexico to dismantle the plan man by man. Karlson shoots faces like evidence. The B-picture as precision instrument.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Phil Karlson
- Photographed by
- George E. Diskant
- With
- Mario Siletti · Lee Van Cleef · Jack Elam · John Payne · Preston Foster · Coleen Gray
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
An armoured car at a bank, a year apart. The Hoodlum plans the job from a gas station across the street; Karlson's crew from behind masks. One film is about the man who cannot stop, the other about the man who has to finish it.