Kansas City Bomber (1972)

Director: Jerrold Freeman
Writers: Thomas Rickman and Calvin Clements, based on a story by Barry Sandler
Stars: Raquel Welch, Kevin McCarthy, Helena Kallianiotes and Norman Alden

Index: The First Thirty.

If the serious increase in lines, screen time and prominence that Jodie Foster received in her second film hinted at an imminent career, this third must have seemed like a kick in the teeth. She plays Rita, the daughter of the title character, Diane “K.C.” Carr, but that sounds a lot more important than it is.

Foster gets one scene a quarter of an hour in when K.C. comes home for a visit. Rita skates down the street with her mum and up to the house where she lives with her brother Walt and her grandma, who never gets a name, just Mrs. Carr. She’s good enough for us to buy into her being a kid wanting to emulate her mum, a professional skater.

She gets a few lines here, unlike her screen brother, who not only doesn’t want to talk to her, he even runs away from her, as if she’s a stranger. This whole family scene is done in a breath over two minutes. The only other time K.C. visits, the scene is just her and her mum, who argues for her to come home and be with the kids permanently. Spoiler: she doesn’t.

So that’s it for Foster in Kansas City Bomber: a skating scene and a few lines that are over and done within a skimpy two minute window. It’s a film all about K.C., played by Raquel Welch, the only name before the title. Everybody else only exists in relation to her, as a child, friend, rival, boss, lover, whatever.

Because of that, it holds a dreamlike quality, as if K.C. is just as a kid and dreaming a future life as a star, without really knowing what she wants. Thus it shifts between a dream, when it seems like it’s all going well, and a nightmare, when she realises that it isn’t. Is she happy or not? We never quite figure that out.

The other reason it’s dreamlike is because it isn’t a sports movie, as much as it might seem like it. Roller derby is a real competitive sport which I’ve seen live and I’ve known a number of tough female roller derby skaters. What K.C. does here isn’t roller derby but is similar. It’s called Roller Games, which is roller derby as sports entertainment, rather than sport.

The obvious comparison is wrestling. Roller derby is like the wrestling that you see in the Olympics. Roller Games are like the WWE. The performers still have to be physically capable and they really perform impactful moves, but the drama is as important, if not more so, than the athleticism and that’s all scripted.

This comparison is clear from the outset, as K.C. is moving from Kansas City to Portland to join a new team, so takes part in a “loser must leave Kansas City forever” one on one grudge bout against her biggest rival in every sense of that word, Big Bertha Bogliani. They do adhere to a vague idea of going round the track, but it quickly devolves into a brawl, which includes an actual elbow drop, and B.B. wins because a third party illegally intervenes.

So to Portland, where there are two teams, the Loggers and the Renegades, owned by the man who headhunted her, Burt Henry. And, if we’re seeing this as roller derby WWE, then he is Vince McMahon, the sleazy boss who sleeps with his talent and manipulates them through dirty moves behind the scenes to mirror what his skaters might use on the track.

So K.C. hits it off with a fellow skater called Lovey Sanford and stays on her houseboat. He doesn’t like that she sees him making out with K.C. on the dock, so trades her to Denver, just like that. Realising that K.C. is rather fond of “Horrible” Hank Hopkins, a male skater who’s simple but honest and has a crush on K.C., he rallies the crowd into mercilessly teasing him, prompting him to react violently and be fired.

I liked “Horrible” Hank more than any other character in this film. He’s written as an object of pity, but Norman Alden endows him with a very real sense of humanity, so, while he may be rather dimwitted, he’s inherently decent, a better human being than anybody else here.

The best acting, on the other hand, is by Helena Kallianiotes, an actress I’ve seen a lot lately, as her first three films were in the First Thirty of Jack Nicholson, which I wrote up last year. They were good friends; she lived in his guest house and managed his property.

She’s Jackie Burdette here, the star jammer in Portland for the prior five years. Right from her arrival, she sees K.C. as her replacement, a fair assumption given that’s what Henry has in mind. Therefore, their inevitable track rivalry is more intense than it should be. She’s bitter and addresses that by climbing inside a bottle.

She was uncredited in Head and Easy Rider in background roles but had a little more to do in Five Easy Pieces as the neurotic clean freak who was hitching with her lesbian lover, played by Toni Basil. I don’t know how big her part was in The Baby Maker but she’s intense here in her fifth movie, impactful enough to be nominated for a Golden Globe. She lost to Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure.

The opening credits make it very clear that all these characters are very much in support, so what about Welch? If she’s the only star of this movie, then can she justify that?

I’d say not really. Sure, it’s all about K.C. and Welch looks fantastic as a tougher sex symbol than normal, but she’s a wishy-washy mess. When Hank asks her out, she tells him that she doesn’t date skaters, out of conflict of interest, and that’s believable, but then she dates the boss. She’s a mother of two who aches to be with her kids, but doesn’t seem to spend much time with them, not just in person but on the phone or even by letter.

It’s also clear that Welch does skate a lot in this film but it’s also clear that she doesn’t do much rough stuff; her stunt double is a bigger woman in an obvious wig who hides her face.

The wishy-washy stuff extends to the very end of the film. It all gets to a particular point that I won’t spoil but will constitute a serious amount of change for many characters. Given that, there’s a new grudge bout set in motion as a bookend of the early one in Kansas City and, well, it goes a little differently to plan.

The question is why and I can’t answer that. I saw two real possibilities and was interested in which the script would take. It doesn’t take one, that’s for certain, but I’m not sure it takes the other. Maybe it takes a third. Maybe not. I really don’t know. The lack of certainty gave me a modicum of appreciation for K.C., but for a moment only because it’s not a good ending, just a selfish one that may not even work out.

All in all, this is a fantastic movie for Helena Kallianiotes, which is odd because it isn’t hers. It’s OK for Welch and just a credit for Foster.