Thieves Like Us / Kansas City
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Robert Altman’s America: A Centennial Review.
Thieves Like Us (1974)
Like the camp announcements in M*A*S*H, a stream of radio broadcasts layer context and commentary into Robert Altman’s Depression-era period piece about a trio of small-time bank robbers in the rural south. They’re also an early clue that Altman here is more interested in exploring time, place and character than indulging in action set pieces. Indeed, despite a string of robberies, we don’t enter a bank with the gang until late in the film. In rustic hideouts and safe houses, a tender love story emerges instead between Keith Carradine’s criminal and Shelley Duvall’s ingenue, a chimera of hope in a country left to fate.
35mm, color, 123 min. Director: Robert Altman. Screenwriters: Robert Altman, Joan Tewkesbury, Calder Willingham. With: Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck.
Kansas City (1996)
Robert Altman’s homage to Kansas City, Missouri, of the 1930s, where he was born and raised, brings its innovative jazz scene to rip-roaring life within a story about the improvisations of survival required during the Depression. When her small-time hood husband (Dermot Mulroney) falls into the hands of a vengeful gambler (a wickedly smooth Harry Belafonte), Jennifer Jason Leigh’s brassy manicurist kidnaps the wife (Miranda Richardson) of a prominent politician (Michael Murphy) on the eve of an election to force his intervention. It’s a desperate hustle in a city where some have to make it up as they go along while the wheels of power roll on.
35mm, color, 116 min. Director: Robert Altman. Screenwriters: Robert Altman, Frank Barhydt. With: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Belafonte.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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