By Erin Free
“Americans have always had sex symbols,” Raquel Welch once said. “It’s a time-honoured tradition and I’m flattered to have been one. But it’s hard to have a long, fruitful career once you’ve been stereotyped that way. That’s why I’m proud to say I’ve endured. Being a sex symbol was rather like being a convict.”
If sixties/seventies screen icon Raquel Welch’s movie career as a sex symbol has been like a prison sentence, then she’s at least received a few reprieves to make the kind of films that kick against her set-in-stone image. While the likes of One Million Years B.C., Fathom and Bedazzled required the actress to do little more than just look good (though she actually looks great), Welch has, on occasion, tested her acting chops. Though admittedly no Meryl Streep, the actress acquitted herself beautifully in such unusual films as Myra Breckinridge (1970), The Last Of Sheila (1973), The Wild Party (1975), and Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976). But by far her most affecting performance can be found in 1972’s Kansas City Bomber, which on the surface just looks like a cheap cash-in on the 1970s flash-in-the-pan craze of roller derbies (almost like rock’n’roll wrestling on roller skates), but which underneath is a much darker, more serious affair.
Directed with no-frills terseness by journeyman Jerrold Freeman (Native Son, Borderline), this surprisingly bleak seventies curio stars Welch as K.C Carr, a single mother (nine-year-old Jodie Foster plays her daughter) and roller derby star who gets traded from Kansas to Portland, where she is immediately hit with a clenched fist of problems: her teammates take an instant dislike to her; the team owner (Kevin McCarthy) is an ambitious creep who wants to get into her pants; and she’s struggling to make ends meet.
The film is a grim take on the world of professional sport, with athletes treated like cattle, and then thrown away when they’re of no more use; this is most horribly shown in the debasement of Horrible Hank Hopkins (Norman Alden), an aging “bad guy” player and one of K.C’s only friends on the team, who is thrown on the scrap heap with particular heartlessness.
The role of K.C Carr is perfect for Welch: she still gets to look sexy while toning down the glamour, and is able to pour her always intense physicality into the role. Welch is earthy, believable, and highly moving (especially in a scene when her young son refuses to speak to her because of what she does for a living), and delivers without doubt her finest performance. Though now largely forgotten, Kansas City Bomber is a rough-cut little gem well worth discovering, or rediscovering.