Kansas City Bomber

Now that we're well into the NFL playoffs, I thought about how football was always a big subject for Hollywood movies back in the day. Some other sports for various reasons garnered much less interest. One such niche sport would be roller derby, which was the subject of the early 1970s movie Kansas City Bomber.

Raquel Welch stars as K.C. Carr, and as the movie opens she's the star player for the Kansas City Bombers of the roller league. However, the sport seems rather more like pro wrestling in that, while it has specific rules and objectives for scoring, the matches as presented in the arenas are more about the ancillary entertainment, mock violence, and drama between characters on various teams. That, and the sport has lost enough popularity that the arenas where it plays look rather seedy. The current match culminates in a dispute between Carr and a teammate who challenges her to the roller derby equivalent of a duel: a five-lap race in which the loser has to leave Kansas City "forever".

Carr surprisingly loses, considering that it's her looks that would make her a star in a league like this compared to the other skaters. But then, a lot of this stuff is choreographed; besides, it's a blessing in disguise for Carr, who is immediately picked up by the Portland Loggers. They're owned by Burt Henry (Kevin McCarthy), who is a big thing in the league, and is even working on getting a new franchise set up in Chicago. Also, it will allow K.C. to be closer to her two kids (one of them played by a very young Jodie Foster, who are currently living with K.C.'s mom.

But K.C.'s being on a new team isn't exactly a bed of roses. She doesn't have a place to stay so winds up rooming with Lovey, a nice player who eventually gets traded and thinks K.C. might have had something to do with it. K.C. might not have, but then Mr. Henry is obviously trying to pursue her romantically. Also, some of the other players start showing their resentment of the attention K.C. is getting much more openly. Jackie (Helena Kallianiotes), who is probably nearing the end of her career and looking like it, has taken to drinking, even hiding a flask of liquor in one of her skates. There's also "Horrible" Hank, who is one of the male enforcers during the men's rounds of the league. (As I understand it, in real roller derby the teams have both men and women, but the rounds are not mixed-sex.) He too is nearing the end of the line, and confides in K.C. while developing an interest in her that piques Mr. Henry's jealousy.

Eventually, the rivalry between K.C. and Jackie heats up to the point that they too are going to have the sort of duel that we saw at the beginning. Mr. Henry engineers this with the idea that K.C. should lose again, so that he can take her with him to Chicago and make her the big star of the new Chicago team as well as the league as a whole. K.C., for her part, is beginning to see through Mr. Henry....

I was somewhat surprised when I read up on Kansas City Bomber to find that it got a fair number of positive reviews. I can see where the screenwriter was coming from, considering movies on a similar theme like Easy Living regarding football. But the screenplay apparently got edited quite a lot into what we see here, and what we see here doesn't really work, being dull and slow between the action scenes. And frankly, a pro wrestling version of roller derby doesn't work for me anyway. Welch apparently like her work here, and I agree that it gave her a chance to expand her range. And she's not what's wrong with the movie. But that doesn't make Kansas City Bomber good.