I saw a screen­ing of Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Djan­go Unchained at the New Bev­er­ly Cin­e­ma, the Los Ange­les the­ater he owns. It was pre­ced­ed by a sol­id half-hour of trail­ers for the var­i­ous west­ern and exploita­tion pic­tures that inspired it, from Take a Hard Ride to Mandin­go. Even if you’ve only seen two or three Quentin Taran­ti­no movies, you know that he not only uses cin­e­ma as his medi­um, but as his con­tent as well. Any inter­view with the man — espe­cial­ly his first appear­ance on Char­lie Rose in 1994, or for that mat­ter, his most recent appear­ance last Decem­ber — reveals that no liv­ing direc­tor has a more enthu­si­as­tic obses­sion with film itself. This gets him adapt­ing, reimag­in­ing, trans­pos­ing, pay­ing all kinds of homage, and (alas, the inevitable term) remix­ing when­ev­er he gets cre­at­ing.

He makes his movies, in oth­er words, by draw­ing upon his vast expe­ri­ence of watch­ing movies — usu­al­ly lurid genre pic­tures, from the beloved to the obscure, the in-their-way-mas­ter­ful to the bor­der­line incom­pe­tent. What a fun les­son in film his­to­ry it would make to watch a sim­i­lar series of source-mate­r­i­al trail­ers before every Taran­ti­no movie.

Most fans would expect such a pre-show for Reser­voir Dogs, his 1992 heist-gone-wrong debut fea­ture, to include Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, which stars Chow Yun-fat as an under­cov­er cop embed­ded in a gang of thieves. It would also have Stan­ley Kubrick­’s The Killing, since Taran­ti­no has said of Reser­voir Dogs, “I did think of it as my Killing, my take on that kind of heist movie.” Should Phil Karl­son’s Kansas City Con­fi­den­tial also make it in? You can watch the com­plete 1952 noir crime pic­ture, now in the pub­lic domain, and decide for your­self. Fol­low­ing the after­math of a gang’s armored-truck heist, the film has received atten­tion as a pos­si­ble influ­ence on Reser­voir Dogs. “Mr. Karlson’s film­mak­ing has few of the stan­dard noir flour­ish­es: the dark and brood­ing shad­ows, the bizarrely cant­ed cam­era angles,” writes New York Times crit­ic Dave Kehr. “Instead he works through gigan­tic close-ups and an unusu­al­ly vis­cer­al treat­ment of bare-knuck­le vio­lence. With refine­ments, he would con­tin­ue to pur­sue this theme (revenge) and this style, right up through his cre­ative resur­gence in the ’70s: Ben (1972), Walk­ing Tall (1973) and Framed (1975).” From fifties revenge crime noir to sev­en­ties revenge exploita­tion: talk about Taran­ti­no’s kind of film­mak­er.

Kansas City Con­fi­den­tial appears in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed con­tent

Free Film Noir Movies

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His Favorite Films Since 1992

Quentin Tarantino’s 75 Minute Inter­view with Howard Stern

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives Sneak Peek of Pulp Fic­tion to Jon Stew­art (1994)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

I once heard a radio broad­cast about a lady who watch­es The God­fa­ther every sin­gle day. Impres­sive as that may sound, it prob­a­bly does­n’t even count among the top hun­dred acts of cin­e­mat­ic faith per­formed in the name of Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la’s 1972 Mario Puzo adap­ta­tion, fea­tur­ing Mar­lon Bran­do. Though I myself more often go to the well of Apoc­a­lypse Now, Cop­po­la’s 1979 Viet­nam-themed Joseph Con­rad adap­ta­tion, fea­tur­ing Mar­lon Bran­do, I under­stand why God­fa­ther fans obsess. Roger Ebert, of course, under­stands even bet­ter. His “Great Movies” piece on the pic­ture describes it as “a bril­liant con­jur­ing act, invit­ing us to con­sid­er the Mafia entire­ly on its own terms,” with a “sub­tly con­struct­ed” script that “fol­lows no for­mu­las except for the clas­sic struc­ture in which pow­er pass­es between the gen­er­a­tions,” pop­u­lat­ed by “remark­able faces” and cap­tured with “rich, atmos­pher­ic, expres­sive” cin­e­matog­ra­phy (by Gor­don Willis), “cel­e­brat­ed for its dark­ness.” These qual­i­ties all do their part to make us hold up The God­fa­ther as a paragon of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma, but lovers of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma tend to val­ue one craft above all: act­ing. How, then, did Cop­po­la and his col­lab­o­ra­tors arrange for such unfor­get­table per­for­mances?

These clips about the cast­ing of The God­fa­ther shed light on the process. Many of us grew famil­iar with what Ebert calls Bran­do’s “just­ly famous and often imi­tat­ed” por­tray­al of Don Vito Cor­leone through cul­tur­al osmo­sis alone, before we’d ever seen the movie. At the top of the post, you can hear Cop­po­la and James Caan talk about what a hard time stu­dio exec­u­tives had accept­ing Bran­do in the first place. “Every time [Cop­po­la] men­tioned Bran­do’s name,” Caan remem­bers, “one of the exec­u­tives said, ‘If you men­tion his name again, you’re out!’ ” Cop­po­la quotes the pres­i­dent of Para­mount Pic­tures as sim­ply declar­ing that “Mar­lon Bran­do will nev­er appear in this motion pic­ture,” but when the film­mak­er pressed them, they offered a deal: “If he does a screen test and puts up a bond guar­an­tee­ing that none of his shenani­gans will cause a delay, you can con­sid­er him.” It was in this screen test that Bran­do came up with the icon­ic bull­dog-like look and man­ner of the all-pow­er­ful Sicil­ian pater­fa­mil­ias. But that alone did­n’t guar­an­tee the film’s ascent into great­ness; oth­er cast mem­bers, like Caan and Al Paci­no, also had to fall into place. Nei­ther were yet box office-friend­ly stars, nor was Robert de Niro, who also audi­tioned. In the end, it all came togeth­er. Rot­ten Toma­toes summed up the crit­i­cal con­sen­sus as fol­lows: “The God­fa­ther gets every­thing right.”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.