Stylistically, the _noirs did much for imposing an aura of machismo and coolness. In this sense, they worked for promoting an appearance—not for deconstructing, but for creating a _legendry of machismo and coolness. Payne is rather cool, as the lead. The movie is supple and deliberately suspenseful. The cast is a very good one. The film acquires, achieves a certain narrative depth.<br /><br />The pace is worthy of a noir's master. After an ingenious robbery, an ex—con is framed ,then released; he decides he has earned a share and is willing to obtain it. The film is violent and stylistically ambitious. The ultra—cool approach, deliberately stylish and classic within the genre's canons and in a highly aware mode, is sustained by an able cast. KCC may be seen as a lesson of noir, as a core film, and as a rehabilitation of the genre into the class of the adventurous thrillers (rather than the cheaply philosophical fatalism).<br /><br />It has a considerable, significant dramatic energy and elastic vigor that might remind one of Welles' _noirs, but on a small scale, with humbler means, and also smaller ends, with a compelling dynamism and concision, explicit this time, but without Welles' inventive subtlety and hazy perspectives. With KCC, these seem _pastiched or quite borrowed (yet they are still functional and did not get the _movieish character of later pastiches that are merely laboratory abstract products)—but then again, such the things were the good of a whole era in cinema …. As it is ,KCC is a fine dynamic adventure movie—a thriller. If in Welles' _noirs the economy was like hidden and secret, in "Kansas …" it is explicit and open.<br /><br />KANSAS … has some of the ingredients of the noir (it is a rather pleasant surprise not to have a standard femme fatal); yet on the other hand, it seems a bit too self—aware, self—conscientious as a cool noir—in a way that better movies (like DOA and SUDDENLY) are not. It's coolness is a bit too obvious and rather overstated. Yet KANSAS … is all the way an interesting, no—nonsense film.<br /><br />The noir is a huge umbrella, encompassing, covering many and various things ,from the bleak, grizzly fatalism to the adventurous, suspenseful thriller to comic books approaches and to the mere police procedural; it refers to a historical cultural phenomenon that began before it is generally acknowledged that it did, and ended later than it is generally admitted.<br /><br />The _noirs' flaw is often the monotony, the poverty of ideas; here again, a vast spectrum is between the intimidating inventiveness and creativity of the greatest (Welles, Wilder, films such as DOA—the _noirs of the most striking originality) that may make a film a thing of many joys, and the dire disappointing monotony of others that have but one note to play. In this important respect, "Kansas …" is certainly way above the average.<br /><br />Nor the fatalism, neither the coolness and machismo typical of the _noirs had their origins here. They both came from the wide popular culture of the epoch between the wars—including the hats and images. They were widely defining of the ancient cinematographic tradition that took shape in times of transition and ample changes in society. The fatalism and the macho and the cool tough guy came all from the popular culture and were not inventions of the noir.<br /><br />The core of most of the _noirs is a naive popular aspiration of both telling sincerely what is perceived as the truth about destiny, life, marriage, society, etc. (that is, a tendency towards sincerity and immediacy), and of creating mythical or at least legendary representations of fatalist machismo and coolness, in a cheap and too—explicit way. This double aspiration is contradictory in itself. These people want to say/intend to say the truth about many things, yet they end up in worshiping fake, phony images of wholly imaginary persons. The people can not afford to be radically sincere, naturalistic ,wholly realist; it always resorts to some kind of (illusory, cheap, silly) compensation that sometimes ends up by taking up the whole intended denunciation. The denunciation of the evils in society and people took the form of a creation of arbitrary images of men and women. The common lies were thereby replaced by more convenient ones.