Jazz, crime, race and politics swirl around the story of a desperate attempt to rescue a lover in Kansas City in 1934, the time and place of director Robert Altman’s youth. With Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Belafonte, and twenty of the best jazz musicians of the 1990s.
The iconic director pays tribute to his hometown, its reputation for political corruption and its music in one of his most underrated and idiosyncratic films. USA, 1996, 116 minutes.
Information/tickets: rivertownfilm.org/kansas-city/
Meet the Filmmakers: Music producer Steven Bernstein and tenor saxophone player Craig Handy (playing Coleman Hawkins in the film) will join producer Matthew Seig for a rare discussion about the music in the film.
* Cannes Film Festival nominee: Palm d’Or
* LA Film Critics Association: Best Music
* NY Film Critics Circle: Harry Belafonte, Best Supporting Actor
* Texas Film Critics: Miranda Richardson, Best Supporting Actress
* Chicago Tribune: 10 best films of 1996
“With the effortlessness of the master that he is, Altman spins a tale of a cockamamie kidnapping that keys a meditation upon race, class and corruption set against a gorgeous period tapestry and a glorious celebration of jazz.” – Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
"Rich in texture, it alternates druggy reveries and a harsh clarity about some brutal realities of life in the American heartland in 1934 as it unfolds during a single calamitous day. Although Altman was only 9 the year the action of the film takes place, its world of black jazz and white power politics obviously informed his youth. Here he celebrates the former and pitilessly indicts the latter". – Jay Carr, Boston Globe
"If the movie, which uses blues-based Kansas City jazz as a raucous, nonverbal Greek chorus, lacks the emotional range of Mr. Altman's masterpiece, ''Nashville,'' it still has its own brawling vitality. Played by an all-star contemporary band in the Hey Hey Club, a jazz saloon and gambling den that the film imagines as the city's spiritual hub, the music blares with a snarling exuberance that suggests American free enterprise gleefully running amok in a 20th-century frontier town. - Stephen Holden, The New York Times