Kansas City Bomber (Artists’ Entertainment Complex, Levy-Gardner-Leven, Raquel Welch Productions, MGM, 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 7) my husband Charles and I watched one of the oddest films ever made: Kansas City Bomber, a 1972 MGM melodrama directed by Jerrold Freedman from a committee-written script: Barry Sandler came up with the original story and Thomas Rickman and Calvin Clements, Jr. did the screenplay. Kansas City Bomber is a film about roller derby that casts Raquel Welch as Diane “K. C.” Carr, who starts the film as the star of the Kansas City team until she falls victim to her penchant for alienating her own teammates. She and her larger, heavier teammate Big Bertha Bogliani (Patti “Moo Moo” Cavin, presumably a real-life roller derby star since imdb.com lists this as her only film credit) have a running feud that ends with them doing a so-called “match race.” The idea is they’ll do five laps around the track and there are essentially no rules about what the skaters can do to each other. Big Bertha wins the match race and thus K. C. is forced to leave Kansas City and move to Portland, Oregon, where she apparently drives all the way because her car (a red something-or-other made by Chrysler) in Portland still has Missouri license plates. She briefly skates for a team called the Renegades but ends up on the Portland Loggers, where she alienates the team captain, Jackie Burdette (Helena Kallianiotes) while simultaneously starting an affair with the team’s owner, Burt Henry (Kevin McCarthy, best known as the star of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Burt takes K. C. out to dinner and then takes her back to his place, and when he makes the obligatory pass at her at first he says, “I didn’t mean for this to happen.” “Didn’t you?” K. C. replies. “Yes,” Burt admits (though we don’t see them do more than some heavy-duty smooching, this being made just four years after the Production Code finally died, and old habits died hard).

When she’s not out roller-derbying K. C. has a tense relationship with her mother (Martine Bartlett), who’s taking care of her two children, daughter Rita (10-year-old Jodie Foster in her second film) and son Walt (Stephen Manley, who also had a later film career, though far short of Foster’s subsequent stardom). Rita is enthusiastic about her mom’s status as a skating star – K. C. even shows Rita how to roller-skate – but her brother Walt couldn’t be less interested in K. C.’s stardom and is actively repelled by how she makes her living. When K. C. is in Portland (where most of the film was shot) she is staying with Lovey (Mary Kay Pass), about the only teammate who actually befriends her, on her houseboat (the interior shot reminded me of the houseboat my mother, my brother, and I lived on for a while in Marin County, California, complete with the funnel-shaped stove that was our main source of heat when it was needed), until Burt trades Lovey to another team because he doesn’t want anyone – male or female, sexual or not – competing for K. C.’s affections. In the middle of the film the skaters, both male and female – among the many things neither Charles nor I knew about roller derby is that it’s racially integrated, men and women both compete (not against each other, but on the same teams, alternating in different heats), and the scoring system is of almost Byzantine complexity – repair to a local dive bar (“played” by the real World Famous Kenton Club in Portland), where her male teammate Randy (William Gray Espy) hits on her. “I don’t date skaters,” she says when she puts him off, later explaining that they’d have to be on the same team together even if their relationship soured. Alas for K. C., her relationship with Jackie Burdette flares into mutual hostility; they knock each other over and body-check each other just as they’re supposed to be doing to the other side’s players.

Eventually Burt arranges for K. C. and Jackie to have the same sort of “match race” with which the film opens, but Burt wants K. C. to throw it. He’s hatched a plot to open a new roller derby franchise in Chicago and wants K. C. to be the star of that team, complete with a major TV contract, but he needs to get her off the Portland team to do it. When K. C. protests that this will separate her from her kids, Burt says, “Bring them” – but only after a so-called “decent interval” of two months or so during which Burt will establish K. C. as both a star and single. The match is a desperate struggle between the two women, and at the end K. C. manages to grab the finishing tape first and win – and then the movie suddenly ends, with no explanation of what that’s going to do with her relationship with Burt (which was on its way out anyway due to her disgust at his treatment of her as a commodity). The most interesting character in the movie is “Horrible” Hank Hopkins (Norman Alden), who’s been built up as a comic-relief character on the track. People are constantly making “Soo-ee” pig noises around him, and in one game, as the fans on both sides start literally throwing things at him, he completely freaks out, starts indiscriminately beating up guys on the other team, and ultimately gets not only thrown out of the game but is demoted to “free-agent status” – i.e., fired – by Burt. Kansas City Bomber is a pretty strange movie, and any attempt by the writers to make roller derby acceptable as a film sport is undercut by the way they and director Freedman make it clear that roller derby, like ice hockey, just spreads a thin veneer of athletic respectability over an activity whose main audience appeal is getting to watch people fight.

I looked up the imdb.com “Trivia” page for Kansas City Bomber, and it claimed that Barry Sandler’s first choice for the female lead was Elizabeth Taylor (huh? By 1972 she was way too old and heavy-set to be credible as an athlete), and that Welch and Ann-Margret were rivals for the role after that. By 1972 Ann-Margret was just coming off her great performance in Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (a movie about straight cruising whose moral seemed to be that heterosexual men demand women for sex but otherwise can’t stand them), which was interesting because to me one of the great disappointments of Welch’s career was that she never got a director as good as Nichols to draw out her acting skills. Raquel Welch gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times at the time Kansas City Bomber was released in which she said it was the first film she’d made of which she was genuinely proud. Even Harry and Michael Medved, whose snarky comments on Welch in their book The Golden Turkey Awards (they named her the Worst Actress of All Time), conceded that in the roller derby sequences of Kansas City Bomber Welch was powerful and effective. Out of the rink, they said, “she reverted to the icy immobility audiences had come to expect from her.” It’s also unclear just how much of the skating was actually Welch’s; the various “trivia” posts claim that she did much of her own stunt work (and broke her wrist doing so, resulting in a six-week delay in the production while she went to Hungary for a co-starring part in the 1972 film Bluebeard, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Richard Burton, for which Welch said, “They didn’t care if my arm was broken”), but she was also doubled by genuine roller derby star Judy Arnold. (Arnold also got a small speaking role in the film. Since she was blonde and kept her hair short, when she doubled for Welch she had to wear a long dark wig.) Another professional roller derby skater, Sally Vega, doubled for Helena Kallianiotes as Jackie Burdette.

One of the more intriguing might-have-beens about this movie is the theme song the great political folksinger Phil Ochs was commissioned to write for it, which Ochs first recorded as a demo with Micky Dolenz of The Monkees and then professionally with the Australian band Daddy Cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAyxWKCqVgU&list=RDmAyxWKCqVgU&start_radio=1. Ochs was a fan of roller derby and was thrilled to get the assignment to write a song for a movie about it, but the song was not used. I suspect it was because it was too doleful and not the sort of rah-rah “entertainment” number for which the film’s producers (including Jules W. Levy, who 25 years earlier had tricked Billie Holiday into playing a maid in her one feature film, New Orleans) were looking. Ultimately Ochs salvaged it by getting his record company, A&M, to issue it as a single backed with the country song “Gas Station Women” from his 1969 album Phil Ochs’s Greatest Hits (a joking title since all the songs were new). I had assumed Kansas City Bomber was the only film ever made about roller derby aside from Rollerball (1975), a serious dystopian science-fiction film produced and directed by Norman Jewison, in which the sport has devolved into something William Harrison, author of the story on which it was based, called “Roller Ball Murder.” Wikipedia actually lists 12 other roller derby films: Blood on the Flat Track, Derby (1971), Derby Crazy Love, Hell on Wheels (2007), Murderdrome, Roller Derby Girl, Roller Life, John McTiernan’s 2002 remake of Rollerball, The Shaggy D.A. (a weird 1976 Disney sequel to 1959’s The Shaggy Dog in which Dean Jones stars as an attorney who periodically turns into a dog), This Is Roller Derby (a 2011 Australian documentary), Unholy Rollers, and Whip It. Still, Kansas City Bomber is a weird movie outlier; it’s fun to watch and the skating and fight scenes are quite convincing, while the stuff in between them is also compelling. It’s also the sort of movie that puts a fresh spin on some old-fashioned Hollywood clichés even though the only novelty about it is the oddball sport about which it revolves.