Kansas City Plays Itself Criminality Cultural Memory and Urban Space

Kansas City Plays Itself: Criminality, Cultural Memory, and Urban Space A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Art History and Visual Culture Studies. 2020 ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................................iv Abstract .......................................................................................................................................................... v List of Illustrations....................................................................................................................................vi Introduction.................................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: The City, Cinema, and Cultural Memory .................................................................... 4 Chapter 2: Film Noir and the Criminal .............................................................................................. 8 Chapter 3: Looking Backward: Kansas City History and the Cinema in the 1950s .... 10 Chapter 4: Kansas City/Kansas City ................................................................................................ 20 Illustrations ............................................................................................................................................... 30 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................... 41 iii Acknowledgements iv Abstract In 1995, Robert Altman shot the eponymously titled Kansas City in Kansas City. In order to replicate the 1930s setting of the film, the production team set about transforming parts of the city’s urban fabric, erecting false facades and making cosmetic fixes to parts of the city that had been long neglected. Following the release of the film the next year, the city allocated funding to revive the filming locations that would essentially make the work of the production team permanent. This is the Kansas City I grew up in – one that now, more than twenty years after the release of Kansas City, the eponymous film, is invariably shaped by it. The lasting effects of this movie were not only material, as interventions on the physical space and built environment of downtown, but also informative of the way the city understands itself, and the way it makes sense of its own history; the film positions Kansas City in a legacy of criminality that has remained relatively static over decades. Now, the transformed film sets sit at a strange confluence of past, present, and future; a simulacrum of the 1930s built in the 1990s and still there today in 2020. They serve as constant reminders of the city’s less-than-savory history, a history that has over time become less scary and more marketable. v List of Illustrations Figure I. Union Station. Jarvis Hunt. 1901. Kansas City, Missouri.……………………..…….30 Figure II. Intersection of 18th Street and Vine Street. 18th and Vine District, Kansas City, Missouri………………….……………………………………………………………………….30 Figure III. Kansas City skyline in Kansas City Confidential. Directed by Phil Karlson. Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1952. 00:01:39…………………….……………………….31 Figure IV. Opening text in Kansas City Confidential. Directed by Phil Karlson. Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1952. 00:01:34………………………………………………………….31 Figure V. The Scout in The Cool and the Crazy. Directed by William Witney. Los Angeles: American International Pictures, 1958. And The Scout. Cyrus Edwin Dallin. 1910. Penn Valley Park, Kansas City, Missouri…………...…………………….32 Figure VI. Poster for The Cool and the Crazy. Directed by William Witney. Los Angeles: American International Pictures, 1958……………………………………………………...33 Figure VII. Poster for The Delinquents. Directed by Robert Altman. Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1957…………………………………………………………………………………34 Figure VIII. Poster for The Delinquents. Directed by Robert Altman. Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1957…………………………………………………………………………………35 Figure IX. Title card in Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996. 00:01:23………………………………………………………………………….36 Figure X. Union Station in Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996. 00:05:50………………………………………………………………………….36 Figure XI. Vine Street in Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features. 00:08:26…………………………………………………………………………………...37 Figure XII. Poster for Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996…………………….…………………………………………………………………..38 Figure XIII. Poster for Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996…………………………………………………………………………………………39 Figure XIV. Hey Hey Club sign in Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Pictures, 1996. 00:07:39. And Hey! Hey! Club. J. Rieger and Co. Distillery. West Bottoms, Kansas City, Missouri…………………………………..……..40 vi Introduction In 1995, Robert Altman shot a film on location in Kansas City. It would be released the following year and eponymously titled Kansas City. Set in 1934, the film’s A-plot follows a woman called Blondie O’Hara, whose husband Johnny has run afoul of powerful Jazz District gangster Seldom Seen with a poorly planned robbery. Johnny is captured by Seldom’s associates for retaliation, and Blondie comes up with a plan to ensure his safe release; she kidnaps Carolyn Stilton, the wife of a local politician with connections in both the Kansas City mob and Washington, D.C., hoping to trade Mrs. Stilton’s freedom for help with a rescue of her husband. The film unfolds in a tangle of flashbacks and subplots that frame Blondie’s exploits against a city that seems to run on activity ranging from blatantly illegal to simply immoral and fed by a soundtrack of high-tempo jazz. The Kansas City mapped by the film is anchored primarily by two real spaces: Union Station, a Beaux-Arts train station that opened in 1914 in the heart of downtown (Figure I), and a block of Vine Street in the 18th and Vine district (Figure II), a historically black shopping and residential area just east of downtown known as the birthplace of Kansas City jazz. In order to make these locations look the part of the film’s 1930s urban backdrop, Altman’s production team renovated them into something more period appropriate, a task complicated by the fact that these parts of the city, by the mid 1990s, had been virtually abandoned. When the film crew arrived in Kansas City, Union Station had been vacant for more than a decade and the resulting neglect had caused significant structural damage; set decorator Susan Emshwiller describes in an interview large puddles on the floor from ceiling cave-ins and an omnipresent thick white mold.1 Similarly, the block of Vine Street used in the film had been reduced to a row of shuttered and empty buildings, a few of which were only brick facades supported by rickety scaffolding. The production crew performed the necessary cosmetic fixes to get each location in shooting shape, mopping puddles and polishing floors in Union Station and erecting false facades with window displays and neon signs along Vine Street. Typically, when on-location shooting ends, these changes would be undone. In Kansas City, however, when production wrapped, the changes to Union Station and Vine Street remained and, following the release of the film the next year, the city allocated funding to revive and rehabilitate both locations, effectively making the work of the production crew permanent. Union Station, which had been at risk of demolition prior to Kansas City’s release, was given a $250 million facelift to repair structural damage, fully restore the floors and ceilings, and install new public attractions. The former train station would reopen in 1999 with new restaurants, a science museum, and exhibition space for travelling art and historical objects. The 18th and Vine district, meanwhile, received an additional $20 million for the construction of the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, both of which opened in late 1997. This is the Kansas City I grew up in – one that, nearly twenty-five years after the release of Kansas City, has been irrefutably shaped by it. My experience of the city’s public space is always already one prescribed to me by the film – going on grade Gina Kaufmann, interview with Chuck Haddix and Susan Emshwiller, Central Standard, NPR, KCUR 89.3, June 7, 2018. 1 2 school fieldtrips to Union Station’s science museum required moving past an enormous station clock that appeared in the movie as salvaged set dressing, and a walk down Vine Street today means a walk past what remains of the production crew’s handmade false facades. These parts of Kansas City sit at a strange confluence of past, present, and future; originally constructed around the turn of the twentieth century, they are now a simulacrum of the 1930s reconstructed in the 1990s and remaining today in 2020. They serve not only as interventions on the physical space and built environment of downtown but also as informers of the way the city understands itself and the way it makes sense of its own history. They point to a past that is part truth and part fiction, a past that is guiding the present toward possible futures, a past that is constantly being generated by Kansas City. The relationship between places and the films that depict them has been the subject of significant scholarly attention with Los Angeles frequently serving as a case study. This paper borrows its name from Thom Andersen’s seminal 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, where Andersen splices together movie representations of the city over time, searching for the divisions between fact and fiction, truth and myth, real and reel. He develops a dialectic, drawing out the differences between the place indexed by the name “Los Angeles” and the place indexed by the name “LA.” Los Angeles, he decides, is a “real” city, lived in and authentic; LA is “reel,” existing only on the silver screen and in the imaginations of moviegoers across the nation.2 Kansas City’s filmography is far more limited than that of Los Angeles; there is a much smaller body of film to be considered and often long gaps in time between the 2 Los Angeles Plays Itself, dir. Thom Andersen (New York: Cinema Guild, 2014). 3 release of Kansas City movies. Kansas City, for instance, is a single film following in the footsteps of a series of movies from four decades earlier in the 1950s. The division, therefore, between a real Kansas City and a reel KC is not quite as clean as the one Andersen draws. There is certainly creative license in Kansas City, but there is truth as well; the dividing line between real and reel becomes blurry, especially in light of the film’s legacy. Ultimately, it is Kansas City’s depictions of criminality and the framing of Kansas City’s urban space with representations of loose morals and illegal activities that come to the fore. This is a criminality, however, that has been retrofitted, twisted to serve the needs of the 1990s and the decade’s push toward urban renewal, resulting in the manifestation of past criminality in contemporary urban space. In Kansas City, the reel bleeds into the real when the criminal becomes marketable; unanchored from narratives of fear and grafted instead to nostalgia, Kansas City’s imagining of criminality commodifies it, making it easy to mobilize in the name of urban revival and redevelopment. Chapter 1: The City, Cinema, and Cultural Memory Cinema and the city have long enjoyed a complicated and somewhat incestuous relationship. The two are “inextricably linked,”3 Mark Shiel writes, pointing out that cinema and the city have seemingly developed in tandem since the birth of film Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 1. 3 4 shortly before the turn of the twentieth century. Shiel goes on to suggest that the properties of film make it a medium uniquely situated to “capture and express the spatial complexity, diversity, and social dynamism of the city.”4 This is reflected in the immediate turn of filmmakers to the city for the content of even the earliest films, which tended to portray the quotidian activity of urban spaces, capturing scenes of workers leaving a factory and trains pulling into a station. Through these representations, film is able to map a city’s social landscape as well as its physical one. The property of film that perhaps best enables it to perform this kind of social mapping is the medium’s perceived veracity, the lifelike quality of that which fills the screen. Like photography, film’s simulated images are able to convincingly reproduce people and places, even if these representations are ultimately only two-dimensional; unlike photography, film is then able to animate these images, providing movement and sound that contribute to a sense of captured reality, truthfulness, and authenticity regardless of how constructed or manipulated these images have been at any stage in production. This quality enables film to be one of a number of forms of media that act as significant shapers of what Astrid Erill calls “cultural memory,”5 or socially compiled understandings of the past in part produced by mediated representations of shared history. Cultural memory, Erill writes, is always vulnerable to deception as the media that it relies on is never as objective as it seems, producing a slippage Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” 1. Astrid Erill, “Literature, Film, and Mediality of Cultural Memory,” in Media and Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erill (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 389. 4 5 5 between what is historically accurate and what appears to the eye to be real (or real enough) and therefore true.6 The slippage between the real and the real enough is the site of production of the usable past, an idea that comes from the writing of literary historian Van Wyck Brooks. In his short essay on the topic, Brooks laments the state of the present literary landscape (at the time of his writing, 1918), which he characterizes as chaotic, anarchic, and wholly uninspiring. But Brooks comes prepared with a potential solution to the problem he elucidates, writing: “The present is a void, and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value. But is this the only possible past? If we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?...The past is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens itself at the touch of desire; it yields up, now this treasure, now that, to anyone who comes to it armed with a capacity for personal choices.”7 History, for Brooks, is totally linear; the present is limited to the conditions generated by the past, and the unsatisfying past he describes is one that “survives in the common mind,” in other words, one born of cultural memory. Since, Brooks reasons, this past 6 7 Erill, “Literature, Film, and Mediality of Cultural Memory,” 389. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial, April 11, 1918. 6 is constructed, then the alleviation of the present’s problems begins with the simple construction of a new past. Of course, Brooks wrote his essay in the early twentieth century, when film as both a medium and an industry was still in its infancy; the usable pasts he imagined constructing were those selected and built in the literary sphere. Writing this time in 2001, Robert A. Rosenstone revisits the usable past, echoing Brooks’ ideas from a new location in a radically different media landscape. “History,” Rosenstone writes, “is never a mirror but a construction, congeries of data pulled together or ‘constituted’ by some larger project or vision or theory.”8 This constituting “larger project or vision or theory,” he goes on to say, is increasingly film.9 Understanding film as able to generate new usable pasts means understanding it also as a persistent site of power struggle. In an interview published in Cahiers du Cinema, Michel Foucault locates film specifically as the site of a fight for the control of what is translated into English as “popular memory.”10 Popular memory, as deployed by Foucault, seems to be the projection of Erill’s cultural memory forward in time; if the implications of cultural memory lie mostly in the past, popular memory drags the same histories and identity formations into the present.11 Therefore, Foucault tells the interviewer, the wielding of power in the present moment necessarily entails a “possession of this memory, [and the ability] to control it, administer it, tell it what it 8 Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marcia Landy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 52. 9 Ibid. 10 Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” trans. Martin Jordin, Cahiers du Cinema, July-August 1974, 25. 11 Sarah Stubbings, “‘Look Behind You!’: Memories of Cinema-Going in the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood,” in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 70. 7 must contain.”12 In the case of the city, cinema has emerged as a key battleground in this struggle as it is a medium with the ability to both generate and corroborate narratives of popular memory. Chapter 2: Film Noir and the Criminal The control of popular memory and the struggle for power over mediated representations of city spaces has often resulted in less than flattering depictions of America’s urban centers. Since the birth of film, the medium has increasingly been interested in capturing – and therefore also been complicit in reinforcing – the anxiety America feels toward its major cities. The steady growth of the city in the twentieth century paralleled a rise in popular concern over the perceived immorality of city spaces and the people who inhabit them.13 In urban areas, growing working class and non-white populations – populations perceived as less desirable by powerful swaths of American society – stoked the fires of white, middle class fear, eventually resulting in a mass exodus from cities to the suburbs. In the meantime, however, popular imaginings of the degeneracy of the city made their way into cinema, resulting in a style of post-World War II film that would be retroactively dubbed “film noir.” Described by Eric Avila as “erotic portrait[s] of an urban wasteland,”14 noir films Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” 26. Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (New York: Routledge, 2003), ix. 14 Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 71. 12 13 8 crystalized the worst of America’s fears about its cities. In noirs, vision is always partially obscured for both the characters and the audience; exterior shots are dark and rainy, and interior shots are dark and smoky. Cities are consumed by their seedy underbellies and populated by those on the fringes of polite society: private eyes, femme fatales, and career criminals. The city in noir serves as more than backdrop; it figures as a character, one that alienates the protagonists at every turn and acts as an acute “site of paranoia and despair.”15 The ubiquity of these kinds of representations of the city, in film and otherwise, began increasingly to populate non-noir modes of storytelling, contributing to an ever-growing sense of the decline of urban spaces as the twentieth century wore on. This perceived decline illustrated the bind America’s cities were in; “in one sense,” Robert A. Beauregard writes, “the decline of cities reduced their threat. Yet, decline also provided more fuel for popular scorn.”16 Although the danger of the city was mitigated by its failure, its reputation still crumbled. While some contemporaneous films, often movie musicals, portray the city in a much more positive light, the trope of the fallen city, languishing and relegated to the sphere of the degenerate and the criminal, has still emerged as one of the prevailing usable pasts in the historiography of American urban space. As the film industry has grown, movies have become imbued with the power not only to describe the city but Ralph Willett, The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 89. 16 Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 16. 15 9 prescribe it in a simultaneous “production/consumption of space”17 that transforms both the built environment and social organization of American cities. Chapter 3: Looking Backward: Kansas City History and the Cinema in the 1950s Kansas City’s history generally follows the contours of most American cities as highlighted above. It sits at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers, a natural port and the site of many indigenous and colonial settlements over time. It served as a significant through-point in colonial migrations westward in the nineteenth century, acting as a frontier town situated at the divergence of the California, Santa Fe, and Oregon Trails. Kansas City was originally incorporated as the City of Kansas in June of 1850 with a population of about two thousand people. After a period marked by violence and unrest during the Civil War, the City of Kansas began to experience steady population growth when Reconstruction-era infrastructure development brought new railways to the city. By 1889, when the City of Kansas officially changed its name to Kansas City, the population was just over 150,000. Like many of America’s urban centers, Kansas City experienced a period of infrastructural and population growth following the turn of the twentieth century. The City Beautiful movement inspired construction and development in what is now James Hay, “Piecing Together What Remains of the Cinematic City: Thinking About the Place of Cinema and Cinema Studies (While Trying to Duck the Fireworks of Another Centennial Celebration),” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke (Routledge: London, 1997), 217. 17 10 the heart of Kansas City’s downtown, growth that would continue with the rise of the Thomas Pendergast political machine in the early 1920s. Also under Pendergast’s leadership, however, Kansas City would become the occasional stomping ground of the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, “Baby Face” Nelson, and other now-iconic gangsters, fueling a popular sense of the city’s downturn. Though Pendergast’s reign ended in 1939 when he pled guilty to tax evasion, Kansas City’s reputation could not quite recover, and a period of mid-century white flight expanded the sprawl of the metropolitan area to suburbs that reached across state lines. Today, the Kansas City metro straddles both sides of the MissouriKansas border and is home to over two million people. Despite its long history, Kansas City would not make its film debut until the 1950s, and, even then, it was at first in name only. 1952 saw the critically and commercially successful release of Kansas City Confidential, a film that follows the story of a Kansas City floral delivery driver who has been framed for bank robbery and must track down the real criminals in order to prove his innocence. Despite flaunting its Kansas City setting in the title, however, only the film’s opening actually takes place there. Kansas City Confidential wastes no time in adopting new scenery; by the thirty-minute mark in the film’s runtime, the characters have all been relocated to a fishing resort in Mexico where the remainder of the movie takes place. During the brief time Kansas City is onscreen, it is introduced with still stock footage of the city’s skyline – including Union Station – and a label to orient the audience to place (Figure III). This establishing shot creates the illusion of truth in setting, generating a sense of authenticity with the presentation of the “real thing.” 11 This proves to be a bit of a bait-and-switch, however, as the rest of the Kansas City scenes are only a simulacrum built from a generic city set located on a Hollywood studio backlot. The streets and buildings – a nondescript hotel, flower shop, and bank – are purposefully anonymous and unremarkable, probably having masqueraded as a multitude of cities in films over time. In fact, if Kansas City Confidential did not make a point of identifying its setting within the film’s first seconds, the viewer would have no way of determining it themselves. Where the specifics of Kansas City’s urban fabric are wrong, so too are the broad strokes of the film’s geography. When the bank robbers make their escape from Kansas City early in the film, for example, they are shown leaving town and driving through a landscape with mountains in the distance, a topographical feature accurate to the outskirts of Los Angeles but hardly one that is appropriate for the American heartland. Small though these details are, they indicate a slippage between the real Kansas City that is lived-in physical space and the reel KC deployed by Kansas City Confidential. Kansas City, here, is a city that has become, as Michael Sorkin writes, somewhat “ageographical,”18 transcending the bounds of physical space and growing to also occupy one that is “vast, unseen, [and] conceptual.”19 Sorkin’s understanding of a despatialized city parallels an observation made by James Donald, who writes that cities increasingly inhabit “the uneasy space between the physical and the imaginary,”20 a space he characterizes as distinctly “uncanny.”21 For Donald, it is not Michael Sorkin, “Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: The Noonday Press, 1992), xiii. 19 Ibid., xii. 20 James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 71. 21 Ibid. 18 12 just pasts that exist in the collective unconsciousness, but the cities themselves, mapped in the immaterial space of popular memory. These definitions of the city straddle Andersen’s delineations of real and reel. In an era where interactions with the world are increasingly mediated, Sorkin and Donald offer an understanding of urban space that, by the virtue of popular memory, lives validly in both spheres; this liminal space between real and reel becomes, in the case of Kansas City Confidential, the terrain of the usable past, the careful curation of history in service of the present. Even before the first images of the city appear, the film offers a black screen and a wall of text which reads: “In the police annals of Kansas City are written lurid chapters concerning the exploits of criminals apprehended and brought to justice. But it is the purpose of this picture to expose the amazing operations of a man who conceived and executed a ‘perfect crime,’ the true solution of which is not entered in any case history, and could well be entitled ‘Kansas City Confidential’” (Figure IV). The “lurid chapters” of Kansas City’s history indexed here, though not elaborated on, sought to feed on mid-century fear of city spaces and would call to mind specific figures who still lived in the minds of 1950s filmgoers. Public fascination with Prohibition and Depression-era bootleggers and bank robbers created linkages in the cultural memory between them, their crimes, and Kansas City, the sometimes host of their extralegal activities. This, combined with the fact that the 13 near-mythic outlaw Jesse James hails from just north of the city, combines to create one usable past that appears to illustrate a continuity of criminal activity going all the way back to Kansas City’s days as a frontier town. The effects of this first entry of Kansas City’s reputation into the filmic record would carry through the rest of the decade. Kansas City Confidential was the first of three films with Kansas City settings made in the 1950s. The other two films – The Delinquents and The Cool and the Crazy, released back-to-back in 1957 and 1958 – borrowed more from the city than just its name and contemporary reputation; unlike Kansas City Confidential, they were actually shot on location there, showcasing the real urban space of the city. Although diverging from the content of Kansas City Confidential, The Delinquents and The Cool and the Crazy are remarkably similar to each other, largely dealing with small variations on the same theme: juvenile delinquency. Both films follow the same basic plotline; white, middle class high school students fall in with the wrong crowd and are led down a path of wrongdoing fueled by alcohol (The Delinquents) or marijuana (The Cool and the Crazy) with tragic consequences. Delinquency in these films is located not in the abstracted space of an imaginary and generic Kansas City as in Kansas City Confidential but in parts of the city’s urban fabric that are instantly recognizable to Kansas Citians. The first exchange of drugs in The Cool and the Crazy takes place in Penn Valley Park on a hill overlooking the skyline with framing that prominently features Cyrus Edwin Dallin’s statue and instantly-recognizable local landmark The Scout (Figure V) while the first minutes of The Delinquents feature a wild drive down Troost Avenue, one of the major north- 14 south streets running through downtown. Even the less iconic locations are generally real; high schoolers in The Cool and the Crazy frequent Pat’s Pig, a real diner formerly on the east side of the city apparently so seedy that patrons are shown in the film removing their hubcaps and putting them in their trunks for safekeeping while their cars are in the parking lot. This kind of movie, the teensploitation picture, was a staple of the film landscape in the 1950s, Peter Stanfield writes in his book about the decade’s popular cinema which borrows its name from The Cool and the Crazy. These films utilized marketing material that foregrounded their contemporaneity, Stanfield writes, invariably seeking to construct themselves as “intimately tied to the here-and-now.”22 The perceived topicality of the teensploitation picture was of utmost importance to its success as it simultaneously piqued the curiosity of teenagers and stoked the fears of parents in order to draw both crowds to the theater. The posters for each of these films illustrates this objective well. The poster for The Cool and the Crazy features a young woman crouched on her hands and knees. Below her, smaller figures of young men are engaged in two separate fistfights. In the upper left-hand corner, above the title, the poster promises a tale of “Seven savage punks on a weekend binge of violence!” (Figure VI). The poster for The Delinquents makes similarly sensational promises; above a mugshot-like photograph of the cast lined up against dark red shadows, one version reads, “The hoods of tomorrow! The gun-molls of the future!” (Figure VII). In an alternate design, the text has been modified to further invite the 22 Peter Stanfield, The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 69. 15 morbid curiosity of potential viewers, instead reading, “Teenagers in turmoil! See for yourself – the ravaged lives in the adolescent jungles of America today!” (Figure VIII). More than simply catching the attention and interest of moviegoers, Stanfield writes, these kinds of advertisements sought to “exploit headline-grabbing, sensational stories of delinquent youth in the 1950s and to link these to equally sensational stories of punk hoodlums from the 1920s and 1930s.”23 Referring to the characters of teensploitation films as “savage punks,” “hoods,” and “gun-molls” confuses their location in time by tying them anachronistically to earlier decades, conjuring the popular lore of Prohibition-era crooks, bootleggers, and murderers and the noir tales of private eyes and femme fatales that followed in their wake. Stanfield explains the implications of this marketing choice, writing that “the gangster biopic and juvenile delinquency cycles shared a generalized concept of how to understand and explain criminality,”24 and citing urban spaces and individual complexes as common to both tropes. This is an explanation for criminality that privileges continuity, stability, and constancy over time, qualities that Paul Grainge identifies as common components of mediated popular memory.25 The conflations between the juvenile delinquents of teensploitation films and the career criminals of gangster movies imagine the two as cut from the same vaguely degenerate cloth, constructing stories of people who come from the same places and have the same problems. Because of this, the Stanfield, The Cool and the Crazy, 135. Ibid., 149. 25 Paul Grainge, “Introduction: Memory and Popular Film,” in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge, 1-20 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 5. 23 24 16 teensploitation film leaves no room for gradations in criminal behavior. Skipping school and doing drugs in The Delinquents and The Cool and the Crazy fills the role of murder or extortion in a gangster film. The exact stakes imagined by the teensploitation film are articulated plainly in voiceover segments that bookend The Delinquents. After an introductory scene, the narrator speaks over the opening credits, saying: “The story you are about to see is about violence and immorality – teenage violence and immorality. Children trapped in the half-world between adolescence and maturity, their struggle to understand, their need to be understood. Perhaps in his rapid progression into the material world, man has forgot the spiritual values which are the moral fiber of a great nation: decency, respect, fair play. Perhaps he has forgot to teach these values to his own. He has forgotten to teach his children their responsibility before God and society. The answer may lie in the story of the delinquents, their violent attempt to find a place in society. This film is a cry to a busy world, a protest, a reminder to those who must set the example.”26 The same narrator closes the film over footage at the downtown police department headquarters with a call to action: 26 The Delinquents, dir. Robert Altman (Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1957), 00:04:07. 17 “This is one story. Who’s to blame? The answer’s not easy, nor are they [sic] pleasant. We are all responsible, and it’s our responsibility not to look the other way. Violence and immorality like this must be controlled, channeled. Citizens everywhere must work against delinquency just as they work against cancer, cerebral palsy, or any other crippling disease, for delinquency is a disease. But the remedies are available: patience, compassion, understanding, and respect for parental and civil authority. By working with your church group, with a youth organization in your town, by paying closer attention to the needs of your children, you can help prevent regrettable occurrences like the ones you have just witnessed. You can help halt this disease before it cripples our children, before it cripples society.”27 These voiceover monologues are ominous warnings. Kansas City, by virtue of a flattened definition of what constitutes criminality, is clearly posited as continuing to be a powerful force of moral degeneracy; the seedy parts of its past are projected forward to the present, and, if nothing is done, even further to the future. The foregrounding of degenerate youth flags a sense of heightened urgency – something must be done “before it cripples our children” – and stokes in the public an anxiety about a kind of well-remembered criminality that existed decades earlier. 27 The Delinquents, 01:10:42. 18 Though teensploitation films are now generally regarded as b-movie fare, this does not discount the scope of their impact beyond their immediate release. Geraldine Pratt and Rose Marie San Juan explain that old films perform an important, if inadvertent, archival function, preserving in celluloid those parts of city spaces that disappear over time.28 Thom Andersen echoes a similar sentiment in Los Angeles Plays Itself. “What is old has been destroyed,” he says, but “old movies allow us to rediscover these icons, even to construct a documentary history of their evolution.”29 The Kansas City of The Delinquents or The Cool and the Crazy no longer exists in physical space; the drive-ins and diners that hosted their characters after school antics are now banks and parking lots. Instead, these places live only onscreen now. In part because of their documentary abilities, Julian Stringer writes, the bmovie has become a symbol of ultimate truthful representation in filmmaking.30 The b-movie lacks the high-gloss veneer of the a-movie, and it translates short production periods and low production values into a kind of cinematic authenticity, managing to seem more immediate and more raw than its polished, big budget counterparts. This has resulted in increasing interest in the mid-century b-movie over the last few decades, an interest starting in the 1990s,31 around the time of the release of Kansas City. Robert Altman, the film’s director, was a Kansas City native, born in the city in 1925. He was no stranger to the b-movies aesthetics, themes, and tropes that mapped Geraldine Pratt and Rose Marie San Juan, Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 11. 29 Los Angeles Plays Itself, 01:15:40. 30 Julian Stringer, “Raiding the Film Archive: Film Festivals and the Revival of Classic Hollywood,” in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 87. 31 Ibid., 81. 28 19 the cinematic history of Kansas City in the 1950s. In fact, his investment was rather personal; The Delinquents had been his feature-length directorial debut. After the release of The Delinquents, his career would move him away from Kansas City, and it would take nearly forty years and thirty films for Altman’s heralded “return to the city of his youth.”32 Once there, however, Altman’s representations of Kansas City revealed relatively little about this passage of time; the indexing of outdated criminality that populated the likes of The Delinquents and The Cool and the Crazy is reincarnated in Kansas City, extending that particular usable past into the 1990s and beyond. Chapter 4: Kansas City/Kansas City Kansas City opens at dusk with a shot of a car driving down a quiet neighborhood street. The camera pans, tracking the car’s progress as it drives up a driveway and parks to the side of a large neoclassical house. Blondie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) opens the car door, straightens her stockings, and gets out, walking the length of the front porch behind the film’s title card (Figure IX). This is the Kansas City offered to the audience in the film’s first minutes – one of quiet domesticity where the location label is literally framed by a stately residential space. The peace of the opening scene is quickly shattered, however, when Blondie talks her way inside the house and pulls a gun on the homeowner, the laudanum-addled Mrs. Stilton (Miranda Richardson), 32 Trailer for Kansas City, dir. Robert Altman (Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996). 20 kidnapping her in a move that will set the film’s plot in motion. Over the roughly fortyeight-hour period the film follows Blondie and Mrs. Stilton, their criminal path intersects with many others; minor characters engaged in equally unlawful subplots populate Kansas City’s Kansas City, positioning Blondie’s exploits against a tangled web of murder, election fraud, racketeering, and petty theft. Almost every character in the film seems to be just a degree or two removed from illegal activity if not directly involved in it. Like the teensploitation films of the 1950s, Kansas City is deeply invested in explorations of criminality; unlike the teensploitation films, which contained degeneracy to a few wild kids, Kansas City presents a world where no one’s hands are really clean. Also like the teensploitation films, Kansas City walks a fine line of negotiated appeals to authenticity. The film is color graded to create a “vintage” effect – the footage is made a little warmer and a little browner – to create the illusion of older footage. Kansas City is also heavily invested in appeals to historical facticity with constant references to historical people, places, and events. Characters hail cabs emblazoned with the logo of the now-defunct Monarch Cab Company. Sets are strewn with copies of the Kansas City Star and The Call newspapers, and posters for a famous 1934 “Battle of Jazz” appear on storefront windows. Characters deliver blink-andyou’ll-miss-it name drops of real-life Kansas City mobster John Lazia and crooked politician Thomas Pendergast. A young Charlie Parker, playing in his high school’s marching band, wanders through a, b, and c-plots. These constant reminders of genuine Kansas City history flaunt the real of the place alongside the reel, weaving a detailed tapestry that illustrates well James Donald’s cautioning as to the deceptive 21 effects of film montage where just enough truth cut together in just short enough time can create an illusion of true authenticity.33 As Robert Rosenstone says in his elaborations on a similar idea, “As long as you get the look right, you may freely invent characters and incidents and do whatever you want to the past to make it more interesting.”34 “More interesting,” in Kansas City, plays out differently depending on which shooting location is in question. The film’s rendering of city space includes a lot of anonymous streets and homes alongside two more iconic spaces – Union Station and Vine Street – which are rendered very differently onscreen. Union Station is introduced with a shot that begins with the camera pointed straight down at parking lot pavement. A few pairs of feet move through the shot, and the camera pans up the building’s façade before stopping for a few moments on a static shot of people moving through the front doors (Figure X). Although the camera is elevated and looks down on the scene from a slight bird’s-eye view, the building still dwarfs everything else in the shot. Union Station is angled so that it creeps toward the camera on the right side, and the heavy Beaux-Arts façade dominates the frame. The camera’s position cuts off a view of the roof, and thick columns extending upward beyond the bounds of the frame stretch the building’s verticality, creating the impression of significant invisible height. The interior shots further emphasize the largeness of the building with more elevated angles and an omnipresent echo added to dialogue and background noise. Everything about the way the space is shot reminds the viewer of the building’s 33 34 Donald, Imagining the Modern City, 77. Rosenstone, “The Historical Film,” 57. 22 importance. Union Station is assertive; it has impressive screen presence, even imposing slightly on the camera in some shots. Union Station’s significance is further emphasized through dialogue and the implication that this is a place with a reputation that precedes it. The building’s infamy is explicitly referenced in an exchange between Blondie and Mrs. Stilton about halfway through the film. Blondie brings Mrs. Stilton to Union Station, telling her it will be a safe place to spend the night until they can get in touch with Mrs. Stilton’s husband the next day to discuss the terms of her release. Mrs. Stilton protests when she hears this, asking Blondie as they walk inside, “What do you mean ‘safe’? People get killed here. Didn’t you read about the Union Station Massacre?”35 The event she refers to is a 1933 shootout between gang members and police following a failed jailbreak that left four people dead. The film’s messaging here is clear; Union Station is simultaneously a social hub, an impressive feat of architecture, and an occasional host to sensationalized criminal activity. Vine Street, on the other hand, does not receive the same impressive introduction. The viewer’s first glimpses of the street come in shots that are tight on Blondie’s husband Johnny (Dermot Mulroney) as he cases cabs for his future failed robbery (Figure XI). Most shots of the street adhere to a similar formula, sticking closely to characters and cars as they come and go without ever offering a real establishing shot. Instead, the film spends a lot of time inside the Hey Hey Club, a jazz club based on the real-life and differently spelled Hey Hay Club which was in operation from 1931 to 1938. Even this space, however, goes without an establishing 35 Kansas City, dir. Robert Altman (Burbank: Fine Line Pictures, 1996), 00:54:45. 23 shot of either the interior or the exterior; the first time the club is shown, the film cuts straight from a poster on a storefront just outside to a medium shot of the club’s piano player, fragmenting the viewer’s understanding of the space and relegating it to a status of criminal non-specificity. Characters receive a similarly broad treatment in the forming of their criminal identities. They occupy stock tropes: the bad thief, the scrappy girlfriend, the embarrassing politician’s wife, the Godfather-esque kingpin. Leigh’s Blondie even speaks in a bizarre ageographical accent that seems to be a vague pastiche of gun moll mannerisms. She barks out her lines with a delivery that is clipped and aggressive, and her character insists on calling Mrs. Stilton by nicknames like “red” and “sister.” She even fluctuates between pronouncing “Missouri” as either “Missouree” or “Missouruh,” sometimes within the same sentence, a strange oversight made in favor of her affected speech patterns. This broad criminality appears to have been a major part of Kansas City’s marketing strategy. Stanfield’s analysis of 1950s juvenile delinquency films and their constant references to 1930s gangsters also applies here; Kansas City’s marketing materials take every opportunity to remind potential viewers of the film’s location, capitalizing on the city’s past notoriety. One version of the movie’s poster offers a vertical split of the design with a portrait of major characters compiled of film stills on one side and white negative space on the other (Figure XII). In the white space, an italicized font reads, “Kansas City, 1934. Anything could happen here. One night, it did.” These words immediately orient potential viewers to the setting, both time and place, allowing them to make assumptions about the content of the film based on their 24 existing knowledge of Kansas City in the 1930s – assumptions that, no matter what they are, are immediately validated by the next line: “Anything could happen here.” Another version of the film’s poster goes so far as to entirely recreate the style of a 1930s film poster (Figure XIII). Here, the film’s characters are illustrated rather than photographed: Blondie is in the middle, holding a gun, and flanked by gangster Seldom Seen (Henry Belafonte) to the left and Mrs. Stilton to the right. The chosen font further enhances the early 30s flair, taking graphic design cues from art deco styles. Whereas similar marketing choices in the 1950s might have been motivated by, as Stanfield suggests, a desire to tap into a filmgoer’s moral panic or morbid curiosity, Kansas City’s gestures to the past seem more rooted in nostalgia. In the film’s trailer, the narrator introduces Kansas City as a place “where opportunity waits for those who take it,”36 framing the criminal exploits of the film’s characters with sympathy, even admiration; bygone Kansas City, the trailer suggests, was roguish but charming. It seems that the same gangsters and bootleggers from the early twentieth century that could still provoke fear in a 1950s audience appeared, by the 1990s, to be less threatening and more intriguing. The usable past that connects them to Kansas City had been defanged by nostalgia, a process that Pratt and San Juan suggest “reverses and displaces time and brings the past to the present in confused, dreamlike ways.”37 36 37 Trailer for Kansas City. Pratt and San Juan, Film and Urban Space, 115. 25 The nostalgia produced by Kansas City could hardly have come at a better time. The 1990s saw a new push for urban revitalization in cities across America. Buoyed by the decade’s economic boom, local governments began to funnel money into projects designed to help alleviate poverty in their communities, even while federal funding for such efforts diminished. Cities all over the country invested in housing developments and public works projects designed to promote tourism as well as community engagement. These projects frequently drew on the past for inspiration; Joan Saab writes that the perceived link between beauty, importance, and history contributed to a phenomenon of nostalgic urban planning that sought to mine the shared cultural memories generated by media and built environments in order to foster a stronger sense of community between a city’s residents.38 Nostalgic urban design can also be a gesture toward perceived authenticity, which Sharon Zukin defines, in the context of the city, as a cultivation of “the experience of origins.”39 In other words, cities try to promote a sense of authenticity by the selective preservation of history in order to foster “distinctive cultural identities” 40 tied to place. In order to produce within contemporary urban spaces traces of the real city of the past, urban planners often turned to a place’s reel depictions. Josh Stenger reflects on the manifestation of this approach in Los Angeles, writing that the “recovery of film history [has become] a viable form of urban renewal.”41 In Kansas A. Joan Saab, “Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow,” Journal of Planning History 4, no. 3 (August 2007): 195. 39 Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 40 Ibid. 41 Josh Stenger, “Return to Oz: The Hollywood Redevelopment Project, or Film History as Urban Renewal,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 59. 38 26 City, film has had similar effects. The excitement of a feature film shooting in town brought renewed interest to long-neglected parts of the city’s urban core; polished for the camera, Union Station and the 18th and Vine district appeared once again to be valuable and important, ripe for revitalization efforts. Set decorator Susan Emshwiller recalled the work she and other members of the film crew put into rehabbing both spaces, saying proudly, “When people saw what it could be, it changed things.”42 The efforts of herself and her crew members were sealed within a veneer of period dressing in the late 1990s by restoration and renovation projects totaling just under $300 million. This renewed interest in cities of the past is part of what Mark Davis meant when he wrote in City of Quartz that “the best place to view the Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future.”43 In order to understand a city as it is now, and as it will be someday, it is necessary to perform an excavation of the city’s history and uncover what usable pasts are being enacted through contemporary historiography and popular memory, as well as built environments. In 2020, the way a city destroys and rebuilds itself, its performance of simultaneous production and consumption of space, draws largely from cinematic representations of history. The post-Kansas City revival of Union Station and Vine Street has ushered in the possibility of a new future for the city. It seems that, in Kansas City, narratives of criminality, or at least a very specifically stylized 1930s version of it, have become a 42 43 Interview with Chuck Haddix and Susan Emshwiller. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), 3. 27 key facet of nostalgic urban planning. The current versions of Union Station and Vine Street, with their explicit visual references to the film, encourage the building of community identities around an articulation of local history drawing on a usable past that has transformed representations of period criminality into something that is an object of public fascination rather than public fear. It is salacious enough to be entertaining but far enough removed from the present to be harmless; it is the right combination of inoffensive and intriguing to motivate the allocation of significant funding to permanent changes to the city’s urban fabric. This articulation of criminality is a criminality that sells, and one that continues to do so – just this past September, a new cocktail bar calling itself the Hey! Hey! Club opened on the western side of the city. The bar’s official sign is a prop from Kansas City, visible in the background of several interior shots which include the front wall of the jazz club (Figure XIV). In this way, perhaps the relationship of cinema to the city can be reconfigured from one that paints it as an omen of decline. Robert A. Beauregard, for example, suggests that the narrative of constant decline that has plagued American cities since the mid twentieth century is not as linear as it seems. Decline, he writes, is constantly being disrupted with periods of growth and prosperity, rendering the truth of the matter much more complicated and much less easily mappable.44 Kansas City reflects this complexity; though it may appear to represent stagnation or deterioration with its insistence on the linkage between the city and outdated modes of criminality, it has also translated into forward momentum in Kansas City’s built environment. The 44 Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 7. 28 criminality of the 1930s, which once sowed the seeds of Kansas City’s mid-century decline, have been transformed into promotional material for the means of its uplift. Kansas City seems to be bound, at least for the foreseeable future, to the usable past generated by Kansas City. But maybe that is not such a bad thing. Sigmund Kracauer writes about the radical ability of film to define viable futures for people and places. Like Foucault, Kracauer acknowledges the role film plays in the formation of popular consciousness. This is often used to preserve the status quo, he says, as the film industry is deeply tied to capitalist institutions and systems. But he also implies that film, used differently, could instead be a catalyst of positive revolution, an agent that liberates rather than limits.45 Contemporary film has the power to precipitate a reversal of the mid twentieth century devaluation of urban spaces fueled by film noir that saw the mass exodus of funding, resources, and bodies from America’s urban centers; it just needs to find the right usable past to draw on. In Kansas City, the usable past of 1930s criminality is no longer something that just sells movie tickets but multimillion-dollar public works projects; instead of warning against regression backward, this is a usable past that can now propel Kansas City into the future. 45 Siegfried Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 293. 29 Illustrations Figure I. Union Station. Jarvis Hunt. 1901. Kansas City, Missouri. Figure II. Intersection of 18th Street and Vine Street. 18th and Vine District, Kansas City, Missouri. 30 Figure III. Kansas City skyline in Kansas City Confidential. Directed by Phil Karlson. Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1952. 00:01:39. Figure IV. Opening text in Kansas City Confidential. Directed by Phil Karlson. Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1952. 00:01:34. 31 Figure V. Top: The Scout in The Cool and the Crazy. Directed by William Witney. Los Angeles: American International Pictures, 1958. 00:26:41. Bottom: The Scout. Cyrus Edwin Dallin. 1910. Penn Valley Park, Kansas City, Missouri. 32 Figure VI. Poster for The Cool and the Crazy. Directed by William Witney. Los Angeles: American International Pictures, 1958. 33 Figure VII. Poster for The Delinquents. Directed by Robert Altman. Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1957. 34 Figure VIII. Poster for The Delinquents. Directed by Robert Altman. Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1957. 35 Figure IX. Title card in Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996. 00:01:23. Figure X. Union Station in Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996. 00:05:50. 36 Figure XI. Vine Street in Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996. 00:08:26. 37 Figure XII. Poster for Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996. 38 Figure XIII. Poster for Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Features, 1996. 39 Figure XIV. Top: Hey Hey Club sign in the background of a shot in Kansas City. Directed by Robert Altman. Burbank: Fine Line Pictures, 1996. 00:07:39. Bottom: Hey! Hey! Club. J. Rieger and Co. Distillery. West Bottoms, Kansas City, Missouri. 40 Works Cited Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Beauregard, Robert A. Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities. New York: Routledge, 2003. 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