[In the following excerpt, Boyd calls Altman's Kansas City "aimless film-making."]

The film centres on the evolving relationship between two social opposites, telegraph operator Blondie O'Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her rich, laudanum-soaked hostage Carolyn Stilton (Miranda Richardson). They wander in and out of situations: the after-hours telegraph office at the railway station from which Blondie wires Carolyn's politically powerful husband, a bar where vote-rigging is being organised by Blondie's sister's husband (Steve Buscemi), a home for unmarried African-American mothers, and a cinema featuring Blondie's role-model Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man. But the only point to this somewhat aimless journey—other than for the two women to discover they have a lot in common once they get past their surface antagonism—seems to be to spin out the suspense as to whether Blondie's ploy will save her captive husband Johnny (Dermot Mulroney) from the vengeance of black gangster Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte).

Yet the mundanity of the Blondie-Carolyn relationship by contrast at least elevates our awareness of the film's real virtue: its outstanding music. In 1934, Kansas City was a conservatory for jazz, especially the big band's of Count Basie, Jay McShann, and Bennie Moten. From these groups come many of the figures who would later become jazz legends including Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker (each of whom appears as a character in the film). It was the pervasive wide-open lawlessness of this town that supported the creative environment, and it is this larger environment that Altman's film tries so hard to capture. Using many of today's top young jazz musicians—Joshua Redman, Christian McBride, Nicholas Payton, Cyrus Chestnut—as some of the original jazz greats, the many musical scenes jump with a rhythm that leaves the rest of the film searching for a pulse. Because here, the multiple stories that Altman is so famous for weaving, are curiously uninvolving. In fact it would not be a calumny to say that Kansas City seems like an elaborately constructed excuse for some great musical performances.

Hollywood has long maintained a sub-genre of film that uses jazz as a cipher with which to explore America's racial politics. Films like Young Man With a Horn, All the Fine Young Cannibals, Paris Blues, and A Man Called Adam recreated the jazz milieu to engage, directly or indirectly, with the racial undertones of the idiom. More recently, films like 'Round Midnight, Bird, and Mo' Better Blues, have likewise foregrounded race and culture in American society, but more overtly. Altman's Kansas City easily fits into this latter attitude. The racial politics of the 30s are mostly explored through the gangster character Seldom Seen. His Hey-Hey Club is a nexus which suggests that the city's colourful flavour is rooted in a perverted racial co-existence. Harry Belafonte is excellent as Seldom Seen ("but often heard"). He is a menacing presence who circles the room, smoking cigars, carrying his money around in a cigar box, and dropping words of wisdom in long lectures about the political situation. "White people are consumed with greed," he says to his captured white criminal Johnny O'Hara, who has tried to rob one of Seen's best gambling customers. He goes on to explain to Johnny that the Great Depression was because, "Y'all couldn't get enough."

Seldom's embrace of black political leader Marcus Garvey and his critique of the establishment are powerfully conveyed, especially with the music of a 'Coieman Hawkins' versus 'Lester Young' cutting contest playing behind him. But Altman does not seem to know what to do with him, spinning out the one basic scenario of him lecturing Johnny as to the white man's follies so that it lasts for almost the whole movie. The action is elsewhere, in gangster and election-rigging subplots, but whenever Seldom or the music is absent you feel the loss. At one point Seldom tells Johnny that the music of "Bill Basie's one of the reasons you ain't dead yet." This line could be modified to comment on the film. It is indeed the music that keeps Kansas City alive.

When Altman's The Player was released in 1992 many thought that this 70s Hollywood maverick had finally returned to form after a long hiatus. The Player was a provocatively satirical look at Hollywood's underbelly made from Michael Tolkin's wry script that made us realise how much we missed Altman's light touch with acerbic material. With Short Cuts in 1993, his ability to juggle multiple narratives and many characters was again transfixing, and seemed to suit the mood of the Raymond Carver stories it was based on. Yet the more ad-hoc Pret-a-Porter in 1994 lacked any real insight and Kansas City continues that film's pattern of aimless film-making.

This is highlighted by the grating performance of Jennifer Jason Leigh in the film's central role as the Jean Harlow-obsessed Blondie O'Hara, (she's a behatted brunette recovering from peroxide-induced baldness). Her trawl across the city with the equally irritating Miranda Richardson is pointless, a transparent excuse for showing off snapshots of the time and place. Out of the corrupt party politics of the Democratic bosses, the predictable self-indulgence of the wealthy liberals, and the blonde ambitions of O'Hara and her pathetic husband Johnny, fed by Hollywood. Altman weaves the tapestry of a city life that is long gone. But unlike McCabe & Mrs. Miller, MASH, or Nashville, Altman's finest movies, Kansas City never gathers its threads together. Nevertheless, Altman remains one of the few independent voices in a sea of repetitive Hollywood mediocrity. Films such as Kansas City at least attempt to focus on real people rather than computer-generated fantasies. And besides, any film that uses jazz as its source—America's highest art form—can never be given too much attention. For these things only, Altman and Kansas City are to be praised.